Week-to-Week: The Way of Water and the Ways to Restart a Franchise
Or start, really, if we're being honest about the cultural status of Avatar before its release
Happy New Year, Episodic Medium subscribers! Before I get into the inaugural newsletter of 2023, some updates. While we weren’t quite dark during the holidays, what with my final reviews of His Dark Materials and Lisa Weidenfeld’s continued coverage of Mythic Quest, we’re back in earnest this week, with Lisa’s Mythic Quest finale coverage joined LaToya Ferguson on Abbott Elementary’s return. Plus, paid subscribers can now start threads in the “Chat” area on the Substack app, where folks are discussing White Lotus S1 vs. S2 and how they’re tracking their TV viewing in the year ahead.
Earlier this fall, I visited an Antique Mall that features a large toy store on its top floor, which has entire sections dedicated to franchises like Star Wars and Marvel, with mint-in-box action figures alongside used toys of all types. Walking through the aisles was a journey through the connection between licensing and some of the highest-grossing films of all time, as massive conglomerates rely on horizontal integration to fuel fandom and profits in equal measure.
It was weird, though, to stumble onto the Avatar section. On the one hand, it obviously “fit” within my understanding of the space as a whole: it’s the highest-grossing film of all time, and its brand of sci-fi spectacle is “toyetic” in the way that would generate action figure sales and inspire play among younger audiences. On the other hand, however, I was struck by how difficult I found the idea of someone purchasing or playing with action figures of characters that ultimately had no cultural longevity beyond the film’s initial release. It may have been a capital-B Blockbuster, but the fact it never leveraged this into additional films or spinoffs meant that the (very full, hidden at the back of the store) pegs full of Avatar figures represented the fundamental disconnect between the film’s industrial success and its “legacy.”
You may recall I wrote about that earlier this year after seeing the rerelease of the first film, and I don’t want to repeat myself. The TL;DR version is that the first film’s legacy has always been bound up in the experience of seeing the film in 3D, and the truth is that this didn’t translate into strong connections with the story or its characters in the same way as box office success has translated for other franchises. It’s why Walt Disney World’s version of Pandora focuses on a tourist view rather than dropping visitors into the film’s story, and it’s also why the narrative about the film’s derivativeness—Dances with Wolves, Fern Gully, etc.—has gained such purchase over the same period.
All of this is to say that going into The Way of Water my number one question was how the film would manage the dynamics of a franchise built around a cinematic experience. I had no question that Cameron would deliver when it came to action and spectacle, and this proved true: between the improvements in integrating live-action footage into the virtual environments and the flexibility of motion-capture allowing him to harness his unmatched command of action cinematography, The Way of Water is stunning to look at. But I actually knew very little about the film’s story heading in, beyond that water played a significant role in the story, and Sigourney Weaver was somehow playing a teenager.
I started writing this newsletter shortly after seeing the film on its opening weekend, but I return to it now having seen the film a second time, and more importantly after some of the open questions regarding the film’s box office performance have been answered. We are past the point in the discourse where anyone could reasonably say that Avatar: The Way of Water is a box office failure. While it is unlikely to approach the numbers of the original film, strong legs over the holidays have ensured it will outgross Top Gun: Maverick as the highest grossing film worldwide of 2022, and—albeit with an asterisk or two1—could pass Spider Man: No Way Home’s pandemic-record of around $1.9 Billion. As a result, we can feel confident that full steam ahead for the Avatar sequels currently in stages of production/post-production scheduled for release in 2024 and 2026 (jury is still out on 2028).
This is relevant because Cameron clearly had a choice when it came to moving forward from his first film. I share the following Twitter thread not to shame its author for being overly pessimistic about the film’s box office result (which even at the high end will be $500m short of the first film), but rather to acknowledge the counterfactual of how to approach getting people reinvested in the franchise…or, more accurately, to see it as a franchise for the first time.
I see the argument for effectively treating Pandora as a connective node to different stories, building a sort of anthology. And the second act of The Way of Water models out this approach, focused as it is on the Metkayina culture. You could have absolutely made a movie focused exclusively on their story, with Jake Sully making a cameo as the water tribe wages their own war with the sky people. Heck, you could have kept the train rolling with subsequent sequels, building out different tribes across Pandora before eventually merging the stories together in an Avengers-like crossover to wage the final war against Earth’s invasion of their planet. And as I was editing this newsletter, news broke that the third film will introduce a “Fire” tribe, proving the point.
Cameron, though, uses his first act to ensure that even if that becomes the strategy for subsequent sequels, Jake Sully is the audience’s point-of-view for the franchise’s journey deeper into Pandora. It’s the clunkiest part of the movie by far, because Cameron—along with co-writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, who’ve had experience franchise-building with Planet of the Apes—fastforwards through roughly 14 years of peace and child rearing (with an adoptive child born of a dead woman’s avatar), delivers the sky people back to Pandora, and rustles up an avatar clone of the first movie’s villain and a heretofore unseen child he was neglecting during the first movie in the process. Suddenly, it’s a movie about the Sully family searching the planet for sanctuary, while the sky people and their blue marines hunt them down to ease their path of turning Pandora into a sanctuary for the residents of a dying Earth.
The way the film rushes through this is an explicit acknowledgment that the first film did not actually create enough substance to support a story-driven sequel—there’s a reason why I ended up writing exclusively about its world-building when it debuted in 2009, concluding “it’s a world I’d gladly return to for a sequel.”2 As such, the first act is a hard sell, using the residual anger stemming from the Na’vi rebellion and Quaritch’s death to propel a larger story that unlike the first film has plenty of worldbuilding clearly designed to pay off in the three other sequels written alongside this one. And I completely understand if there are moviegoers who reject this hard sell, given how it tries to paper over the first film’s limitations with rapid-fire exposition.
However, beyond the fact that we won’t truly know how effective this is until we see the other three sequels Cameron mapped out with Jaffa, Silver, Josh Friedman, and Shane Salerno, it allows The Way of Water navigate the two dominant paths forward for a sequel. On the one hand, yes, the film’s first act forces the viewer to see this as an epic narrative of the Sully family, which probably isn’t something audiences actively demanded and would turn out to the theaters for. But this enables the sequel to mirror the integration and acclimation narrative of the first film, with Jake’s family—particularly his kids—learning the ways of the Metkayiri just as he learned the ways of the Omatakiya in the first film. It delays the start of the actual movie, but it gives Cameron new surrogates to explore the Tulkun and the other dimensions of the water tribe, which gets the movie the closest to focusing on expanding the world of Pandora, which is probably what would get audiences back into theaters most readily (and remains central to the film’s marketing).
This would also represent a larger problem if the ending of the film’s didn’t mostly pay off these efforts, but to me it mostly does. I’m ambivalent about how the Spider/Quaritch side of things plays out, but I was surprised by how effective I found the other kids’ stories. Kiri’s offers both a gradual sense of discovery and a continuation of the Eywa storytelling from the first film, merging the worldbuilding and character side of the equation. Lo’ak’s relationship with Payakan is the spiritual heart of this film, fleshing out his “second son” resentment in ways that converge effectively in the climax amid Netayam’s death. And while Tuk doesn’t have a story to speak of, her pure innocence is itself valuable, both in expanding the film’s appeal for a younger audience and offering some variances in tone.
The plot also does an effective job of letting the kids be kids without turning that into a contrivance: although they’re often (read: always) ending up in trouble, their recklessness is never itself the cause of major turns in the story. They’re in the wrong place at the wrong time a lot, but always for a reason, and Quaritch only learns of Sully’s location due to the medivac he calls in for Kiri, who was simply participating in a normal Na’vi ritual of connecting with Eywa. The film did a nice job of putting the kids in peril but also giving them enough competence and agency that they’re not helpless in those positions, which does a lot to establish them as protagonists in their own right.
It’s such that while the film rushes to reorganize itself as a Sully family epic in ways that it’s easy to be cynical about, by the time Cameron starts his action climax there’s enough substantive story about these characters and their journeys within this film for an emotional core to emerge. When the Metkayina formally welcome them into their fold, and as Sully resolves to make their stand instead of running, the idea of the Avatar films as the story of this family and their people’s stand against colonial violence feels fully formed. It may not be groundbreaking new story territory for motion pictures, but it’s a foundation for a story-driven franchise that simply did not exist when the movie started.
Provided the release date remains in place for the third film in the series, we’ll know in two years whether Cameron successfully hooked the people he got people to the theater based on their memory of the first film’s spectacle with a story they’re invested in. I’m not suggesting that Lo’ak action figures are going to fly off the shelves, or that we’ll see a huge influx of Kiri Halloween costumes come October. But when another Avatar movie is on the horizon, there will undoubtedly be more factors driving interest than the experience of seeing the first movie, and that’s a positive sign for the possibility of more action figures to follow.
Episodic Observations
The biggest issue I have with The Way of Water is its struggle to articulate its adult female characters. Kate Winslet gets some strong moments as Ronal, but the character never registers, and it really feels like there’s a cut subplot about her and Neytiri, who also struggles to find oxygen narratively speaking outside of Spider’s fear of her as a “true” Na’vi that comes to bear in the climax. I’m curious to see if the subsequent films rebalance things in terms of gender, perhaps pushing the Daddy Issues story to the wayside in favor of a more Neytiri and Kiri-centered narrative.
I actually haven’t been down the action figure aisle since The Way of Water came out, but I do kind of want the Payakan LEGO set.
I haven’t made it to any of the other December movie releases, and likely won’t, but the family did gather together for Glass Onion (a rewatch for me, having caught it in theaters) and Top Gun: Maverick (which everyone had seen, but they had gone to a drive-in, and frankly that doesn’t count as having experienced that movie).
I haven’t gotten to as much TV as I had hoped to over the holidays, but I’ve got some long flights coming up, so I’ve sort of been saving things for that. I did, however, start The Lazarus Project—which aired in the U.K. over the summer and Canada in the fall—ahead of its U.S. premiere on TNT later in the month, and my thoughts are best captured by the fact I’ll have weekly reviews starting on the 23rd. Shoutout to the folks who’ve brought it up in past discussion sections. You were right.
I also started the National Treasure legacyquel with my mother, which is perfectly watchable fluff, albeit without ever capturing the verve of the film or much momentum independent of it? I thought Joshua Alston’s review at Variety captured the show’s struggle, even if I’ve enjoyed it more than he did.
We also checked out the premiere of Will Trent, ABC’s new crime series, which was notable for failing to resolve its central cliffhanger case. Like friend of the Substack Daniel Fienberg at The Hollywood Reporter, I consider that promising, but his report that it does resolve in the second episode and the fact there’s a weak B-plot means that my optimism is somewhat limited. Erika Christensen, though? Great energy.
The primary asterisk is the fact that Avatar, unlike Spider-Man, received a release in China, although we could probably throw Omicron into the mix as another variable as well that might have limited No Way Home’s performance.
Note that this article also uses this as an opportunity to write about the ninth season of Scrubs, because I was trying to impress the graduate programs I was applying to by pretending I was a media scholar before I was a media scholar.
"I haven’t gotten to as much TV as I had hoped to over the holidays, but I’ve got some long flights coming up, so I’ve sort of been saving things for that. I did, however, start The Lazarus Project—which aired in the U.K. over the summer and Canada in the fall—ahead of its U.S. premiere on TNT later in the month, and my thoughts are best captured by the fact I’ll have weekly reviews starting on the 23rd. Shoutout to the folks who’ve brought it up in past discussion sections. You were right."
VINDICATED!
My main recent watch was a rare reality TV watch for me - the BBC version of The Traitors, in which 22 people in a castle in Scotland try to work out which members of the group are "traitors." The group vote out one person an episode who they think is a traitor, and the traitors choose one person an episode to get rid of overnight. If all the traitors are caught by the end of the season, the remaining players - The Faithful - split the prize money amongst themselves. If there are any traitors uncaught, they get it all for themselves.
There's an American version on Peacock starting next week, hosted by Alan Cumming, which looks like it was filmed in the same location, but they've cast a bunch of Reality TV folks rather than members of the public like the BBC version. https://youtu.be/P3rqVPKOKfQ
Might be worth watching for Cumming anyway.
Thank you for the review! I've just got back from seeing Avatar 2, and it's hooked me in enough to go and see the next one. It was a worthwhile cinematic experience for me. It was nice to be taken away somewhere for 3 hours and 20 minutes. (An interval would have been great though!)