James Cameron is finally following up the on-off highest grossing film of all time, 2009's Avatar, with sequel The Way of Water later this year.
The legendary director has spoken time and time again about how he's waited for technology to be good enough to film underwater with all the motion-capture technology, but in a new interview with The New York Times, Cameron has mused on whether the wait between films was too long.
"I think I could have made a sequel two years later and have it bomb because people didn’t relate to the characters or the direction of the film," he explained.
"My personal experience goes like this: I made a sequel called Aliens, seven years after the first movie. It was very well received. I made a sequel called Terminator 2, seven years after the first movie. It did an order of magnitude of more, in revenue, than the first film.
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"I was a little concerned that I had stretched the tether too far, in our fast-paced, modern world, with Avatar 2 coming in 12 years later. Right until we dropped the teaser trailer, and we got 148 million views in 24 hours.
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"There’s that scarce seen but wondered at principle, which is, 'Wow, we haven’t seen that in a long time', but I remember how cool it was back then. Does that play in our favour? I don’t know. I guess we’re going to find out."
It's a bit more of a measured take than when he recently stated that anyone who jokes about forgetting what happened in the first film would "shut the f**k up" as soon as they watched it again (which they can do in cinemas as it's getting re-released while being taken off Disney+).
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"The trolls will have it that nobody gives a shit and they can't remember the characters' names or one damn thing that happened in the movie," he told Empire, but noted: "I'm not worried about that."
Will people care, and will those huge trailer numbers translate into box office takings? Only time will tell.
Avatar will be re-released in cinemas September 23. Avatar: The Way Of Water will be released in cinemas on December 16.
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Joe Anderton is a freelance news writer at Digital Spy, having worked there since 2016. In his time, he's covered a host of live events and interviewed celebrities big and small. A big fan of TV and movies both mainstream and obscure, Joe also enjoys video games and in particular PlayStation. Joe currently does not use Twitter, but he only ever used it to tell people to watch the film Help! I'm a Fish.
