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Opinion | The 'Avatar: The Way of Water' sequel is coming. Will the world want it? - The Washington Post

There’s a running joke that “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0499549/" target=_blank>Avatar</a>” is the biggest movie ever made to leave no cultural footprint. If you mention “Avatar” on social media, someone will quickly and proudly proclaim they cannot recall the main character’s name (it’s Jake Sully) or even a single line of dialogue (okay, you got me there). For a picture that <a href="https://www.the-numbers.com/box-office-records/worldwide/all-movies/cumulative/all-time" target=_blank>grossed</a> nearly $3 billion worldwide, the thinking goes, it has had little lasting impact.

This winter, “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1630029/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0" target=_blank>Avatar: The Way of Water</a>,” the first sequel of a multi-movie rollout, hopes to return audiences to the unobtainium-rich planet of Pandora. The big question is whether our own world of theatrical exhibition and audience taste has moved on. But at the risk of being made to look very foolish in a few months, I’ll put my money on James Cameron. The director has a solid enough track record of turning doubters into believers — along with an ace up his sleeve overseas — that a smash-hit sequel is the surest bet.

Of course, “Avatar: The Way of Water” faces a very different business environment than the original did 13 years ago when it debuted. The emergence of 3D as a means of not only attracting audiences to theaters but also getting them to pay more for the privilege was still a relatively new phenomenon in December 2009. While “Avatar” wasn’t the first 3D release, it was the first <i>must-see</i> 3D release, an accomplishment owing to the love and care and, frankly, obsessiveness of Cameron.

That obsession paid off in a big way. When “Avatar” passed Cameron’s 1997 “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120338/?ref_=nm_knf_i2" target=_blank>Titanic</a>” as the highest-grossing domestic film of all time, it did so on the back of those surcharges. “Breaking domestic down, nearly 81 percent of ‘Avatar’s’ gross is from 3D presentations,” Box Office Mojo <a href="https://www.boxofficemojo.com/article/ed2356806660/">reported at the time</a>. “Normal 3D accounts for over 64 percent of the gross, while IMAX 3D accounts for more than 16 percent.” That surcharge, plus normal ticket inflation, meant that “Avatar” topped “Titanic’s” record while notching half as many actual admissions.

Movie audiences, however, shifted decisively away from 3D presentations in the years following “Avatar’s” triumph. In part, it is because a rash of awful-looking movies featuring 3D conversion — that is, a 3D effect created within a computer rather than by shooting with 3D cameras — made the format feel like a cheap cash grab designed to separate fools from their money. (Which, to be fair, is basically what the format was.)

As a result, the proportion of revenue generated by 3D sales has remained in steady decline. In 2019, the last pre-pandemic year for which we have reasonably good comparison figures, just <a href="https://www.motionpictures.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/MPA-THEME-2019.pdf">15 percent</a> of global box office revenue was generated by 3D, a dip from 21 percent in 2015. And the only reason it wasn’t even lower than that is the surge of 3D theaters built in the Asia-Pacific region.

I imagine folks will make an exception to their 3D aversion given that the last movie many of us remember being worth the extra expense was the predecessor to “The Way of Water.” If Cameron could engineer a 3D coup once, he could do it again. But whether U.S. audiences return to the format might be something of an afterthought. The “Avatar” sequel will benefit hugely from the biggest way the movie business has changed over the past 13 years: the pivot to China.

“Avatar” reclaimed the worldwide <a href="https://deadline.com/2021/03/avatar-china-re-release-global-record-raya-minari-shin-evangelion-international-box-office-1234714029/" target="_blank">box office crown</a> from “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4154796/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0" target="_blank">Avengers: Endgame</a>” with its 2021 rerelease in China that added more than $20 million to its total — at that point, the biggest box office take in China since theaters had reopened following the pandemic’s closure of theaters. As Forbes’s Scott Mendelson <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2021/03/09/box-office-avatar-is-returning-to-china-but-not-to-topple-avengers-endgame/?sh=3bffa19b3473">noted</a>, “Avatar” grossed $206 million in China on its initial release; that was a third of what “Endgame” grossed a decade later … but it did it on just one-tenth as many screens.

Simply put, the appetite for “Avatar” content in China is enormous. Assuming the sequel gets a full release — always a question given Chinese censorship and the country’s ever-fluctuating coronavirus restrictions — it’s hard to imagine Cameron’s follow-up grossing less than $1 billion in China alone. Most likely, the ceiling is actually much higher.

As for us back in the states? One preliminary piece of data suggests we’re not yet ready to leave Pandora behind for good: “The Way of Water’s” teaser trailer racked up nearly 150 million views on YouTube in its first 24 hours. Is that good? Well, according to <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/avatar-way-of-water-trailer-online-views-1235144334/">the Hollywood Reporter</a>, the figure beats every recent “Star Wars” movie. So, yeah, pretty good.

It’s James Cameron’s waterworld. We’re just swimming in it.

Sonny Bunch, a Washington Post contributing columnist, is the culture editor for The Bulwark, where he writes the Screen Time newsletter and hosts a podcast about the business of Hollywood. 

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The 'Avatar: The Way of Water' sequel is coming. Will the world want it?

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Does the world really want an ‘Avatar’ sequel?

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Opinion | The ‘Doctor Strange’ sequel is rated PG-13 because it’s for teens, not because it's not high art - The Washington Post

The brewing debate over the MPA rating for director Sam Raimi’s “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWzlQ2N6qqg" target=_blank>Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness</a>” is nominally about the tricky gray area separating a PG-13 movie and an R-rated one. In truth, it’s the latest effort by fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to convince the rest of us that these are grown-up movies for adults and deserve to be treated, and rated, as such.

The MPA’s Classification and Ratings Administration aims for consistency above all else. As Joan Graves, then-chair of the group, noted repeatedly during a 2013 panel at SXSW moderated by The Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg, the <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/2013/03/the-mpaas-joan-graves-visits-sxsw-to-talk-ratings-40164/">whole point</a> of the MPA ratings board is to provide information to parents while balancing the concerns of 300 million-plus people living in regions that have, occasionally, radically different preconceptions about child rearing. Even parents who disagree with one another about what’s appropriate need to have some frame of reference when deciding whether to let their 14-year-old wander into a movie unaccompanied.

So what would be the case for giving the PG-13 movie “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” an R-rating? Writing in <a href="https://variety.com/2022/film/columns/doctor-strange-multiverse-of-madness-horror-pg13-rating-graphic-mpaa-1235258889/">Variety</a>, Clayton Davis gives the argument his best shot, arguing that, “with brutal scenes of people getting cut in half, shocking jump scares, and a sequence that is a terrifying (albeit terrific) ode to Jack Nicholson in ‘The Shining,’ we can safely classify this entry as the most ‘adult’ MCU outing yet.”

Meanwhile, the perpetually jittery on Twitter suggested the film’s level of gore was too intense for normal viewers and needed a trigger warning beyond the MPA’s rating.

Still, this seems like a bit of a stretch. “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” is as much a PG-13 movie as any of its predecessors. Which is essentially the only means we have to judge ratings since they’re all relative by design.

There’s no foul language or sex to speak of. And the violence is well within the bounds of other PG-13 offerings: Most of the action is of the CGI sparkle-fingers variety, with one slightly more intense sequence featuring a handful of new-to-us multiversal heroes serving as cannon fodder that, frankly, is the only thing that pops this up from a PG movie to a PG-13 movie.

The “tone” of “Multiverse of Madness” is slightly trickier to quantify than the swearing, sexing and slugging. But we don’t have to look far to see a similar offering: Raimi’s own “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1127180/" target=_blank>Drag Me to Hell</a>” is infinitely meaner, rougher and uglier than “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” and that movie also secured a PG-13 rating during its theatrical run.

As a parent, I probably wouldn’t let my daughter go see “Multiverse of Madness.” But that’s mostly because she’s 6 and not, say, 14. In other words, it’s because she’s under 13, an age that feels, more or less, about right for a movie of this type. The PG-13 rating exists for a reason, and those reasons are “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087469/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target=_blank>Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom</a>” (which, despite featuring the extraction of a still-beating heart, nabbed a PG) and “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087985/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target=_blank>Red Dawn</a>” (the unapologetically bloody first PG-13 picture), borderline movies that weren’t quite R-worthy but were probably too intense for little kids.

But really, the debate here isn’t about whether Marvel’s latest offering is appropriate for children; it’s about whether they’re appropriate for adults. The suggestion that “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” is an R-rated movie has more to do with the demand that these movies be taken “seriously.” The strident belief that the movie about wizards and witches traipsing through the multiverse is an R-rated adventure is a kissing cousin to the strident belief that MCU movies are owed best picture nominations as a marker of their seriousness.

There remains a fervent belief among comic book fans that the genre is the Rodney Dangerfield of filmmaking, a belief stoked by actors who <a href="https://variety.com/2022/film/news/elizabeth-olsen-defends-marvel-movies-1235261945/">react indignantly</a> whenever you suggest a paycheck job in a kids movie isn’t equivalent to high art. No matter how many times you channel Don Draper and yell “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77Y6CIyyBcI" target=_blank>that’s what the money is for</a>” — and “Multiverse of Madness” will make a ton of it — fans will demand that respect accompany the lucre. An R-rating would confer that respect, the acknowledgment that, hey, this is a movie for people who can vote and go to war.

The MPA’s job is not to assuage the adults in the audience that their vestigial belief in the inherent childishness of comic book movies is false. It’s to guide parents and help them decide what is okay for their younger wards to enjoy. In the case of “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” they’ve done a fine job.

If you take your small child to see a movie with a PG-13 rating and they wind up with nightmares after seeing a giant Lovecraftian monstrosity get its CGeyeball plucked from its head, well, that’s on you. And if you’re spending this much time justifying that same trip to the movies as a major artistic experience, that’s for you to examine as well.

The ‘Doctor Strange’ sequel is rated PG-13 because it’s for teens, not because it's not high art

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The ‘Doctor Strange’ sequel is PG-13. That’s because it’s for teens.

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Opinion | 'Grey's Anatomy' writer Elisabeth Finch is accused of stealing her wife's life story for gain. She's not the only such suspected fraudster. - The Washington Post

The desire for authenticity in the arts is understandable. Audiences want to feel as though something is plausible, that what is taking place onscreen or on the page is real on some level, even if the events are totally bonkers.

But we’ve gone badly off the rails when “lived experience” becomes the stand-in for authenticity. The term itself has made a fraught transition from “personal knowledge gained through firsthand behavior” to “unassailable truth as defined by how I have lived my life.” And prizing “lived experience” over other credentials makes it inevitable that fraudsters will invent backstories for themselves in an effort to game the system.

You see that at work in Vanity Fair’s <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/05/greys-anatomy-elisabeth-finch-truth-lies#intcid=_vanity-fair-verso-hp-trending_f3b759fa-cb54-418e-a3c5-a3cd60fc8cd3_popular4-1">two-part</a> <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/05/greys-anatomy-elisabeth-finch-jennifer-beyer">series</a> on Elisabeth Finch, a writer for “Grey’s Anatomy.” Finch used the various dramas and illnesses she claimed to have suffered to fuel her career. But she has come under scrutiny following accusations that she essentially stole someone else’s life story in pursuit of that prized authenticity.

You really have to read the whole series, but the short version is this: A writer on Shonda Rhimes’s hit hospital drama seems to have invented not only having cancer but also having been the survivor of abuse, lifting the life story of a woman she met in therapy and then married. What was interesting to me was less the fraud — the world is a bottomless pit of petty fraudsters — than the way Finch used the initial health fraud to gain an upper hand in the “Grey’s Anatomy” writers room.

“Cancer afforded her certain privileges. She had an extra comfortable chair. From there, she tacitly claimed extra talking rights,” Evgenia Peretz writes. “When Finch had the floor, she was not to be interrupted, and took whatever time she needed drawing out her stories. Anyone else could lose their job for being such a room hog.”

Because it was a current and ongoing thing, Finch’s “lived experience” topped even that of other writers in the room, leading actual cancer survivors to avoid weighing in on potential cancer-based plotlines. The fact that she was “the only person [in the writers room] who identified as a person with a disability” was her trump card, an unassailable diversity play.

This sort of professional fakery pops up in academia from time to time. Who can forget the story of Jessica Krug, the associate professor at George Washington University who pretended to be Black to <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/04/prominent-scholar-outs-herself-white-just-she-faced-exposure-claiming-be-black">burnish her right to speak</a> before confessing and melodramatically canceling herself. The less time spent <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/13/rachel-dolezal-i-wasnt-identifying-as-black-to-upset-people-i-was-being-me">remembering Rachel Dolezal</a>, the better.

Elsewhere in the entertainment-industrial complex, lived experience has become a valuable form of PR. Jeanine Cummins’s novel “<a href="https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B07QQLCZY1&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_7CVBZD5553H668JB43AN&tag=thewaspos09-20" target=_blank>American Dirt</a>” scored a huge advance, an initial print run of half a million copies and a coveted placement in Oprah’s Book Club. But a firestorm of controversy followed when it turned out Cummins might have exaggerated her life story.

While the book had defenders (rapturous early notice, the aforementioned Oprah imprimatur) and detractors (post-controversy reviews were frequently unkind), conversation about the book was only nominally actually about the book. Rather, it was about whether Cummins had any right to tell the story, whether her lived experience aligned with the book’s depictions of the refugees fleeing cartel violence in Mexico.

Cummins had leaned into her Latino heritage (a <a href="https://www.guernicamag.com/what-about-your-grandmother-jeanine/#:~:text=Jeanine%20Cummins%2C%20author%20of%20the,has%20a%20Puerto%20Rican%20grandmother." target="_blank">grandmother</a> is Puerto Rican) and spoken of fears for her husband, an undocumented immigrant. Except, oops, she described herself as “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/opinion/sunday/murder-isnt-black-or-white.html">white</a>” in years past and the “undocumented immigrant” husband was <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/writer-jeanine-cummins-regrets-conflating-woes-of-irish-husband-and-mexican-migrants-925sbgv7j">Irish</a>, which has a <i>slightly</i> different connotation in many of the United States’ discussions about immigration, legal and otherwise.

There are two entangled ideas worth separating.

The first is whether authenticity itself is something worth prizing. Some audiences certainly seem to think so, at least in a narrow way: “What X gets wrong about Y” is a perennial think-piece format. Filmmakers such as Robert Eggers go to great lengths to nail period details out of a belief that such care can help transport viewers to another era and mind-set. The job of “sensitivity reader” has emerged to help authors get cultural contexts right — or at least to avoid Internet firestorms. That said, the idea of a show as <a href="https://www.tvinsider.com/1014503/greys-anatomy-disasters-list/">perpetually absurd</a> as “Grey’s Anatomy” aiming for authenticity is at least a little ridiculous.

The second is whether the lived experience that claims to inform such authenticity is more valuable than, say, standard research. Reading as much on a subject as possible and interviewing those who have partaken in what you hope to portray both strike me as, potentially, more valuable than merely claiming to identify with those to be portrayed, assuming authenticity is, in fact, a value to be prized.

Whatever else it does, prizing “lived experience” over all else <a href="https://twitter.com/PhilNobileJr/status/1521436433680056320">incentivizes a whole rash of terrible behaviors by unscrupulous people</a>. Perhaps instead we should prize something a bit more concrete — such as an artist’s output.

Sonny Bunch

Dallas, TX

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