Avatar: The Way of Water will Run for More than 3 Hours

Nowadays, blockbuster films seem to have settled on running for only two-and-a-half hours, but every now and then we get some films that want to ‘go the distance’.

 Just in, The Hollywood Reporter has revealed that James Cameron’s upcoming return to Pandora—Avatar: The Way of Water—is set to run for a whopping 3 hours and 10 minutes (or 190 minutes). For comparison, the first Avatar ran for 162 minutes; the sequel’s half an hour longer than the original movie.

With Avatar having the title of the highest-grossing movie of all time before Avengers: Endgame came along, you can bet that Cameron and the studio would want to sell this follow-up as a huge visual epic—and sometimes, you’ll need a long runtime to tell that story. Heck, even Endgame ran for more than three hours, but it still managed to make bank at the box office.

Since Avatar is currently working on four more sequels, you’d think that Cameron would find a way to space out the stories with shorter runtimes, but I guess that could just be a testament to how huge these upcoming films are aiming to be. After all, this is James Cameron, who has been making genre-defining blockbusters since the 80s. If he wants to give a movie more than three hours of runtime, he’s going to get it.

Catch Avatar: The Way of Water when it hits theaters on Dec. 16, 2022.