Avatar: The Way of Water breaks many boundaries, and for James Cameron showing a different kind of female empowerment is a big part of that.
James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water pushes many boundaries in the world of filmmaking, and the director wanted to use the movie to bring a different level of female empowerment to audiences. While speaking to Variety about his Avatar sequel, Cameron said he believes that while the MCU and DCU have introduced some strong female characters, he wanted to go beyond that, and making Neytiri a pregnant warrior was the way to go about it. He said:
“Everybody’s always talking about female empowerment. But what is such a big part of a woman’s life that we, as men, don’t experience? And I thought, ‘Well, if you’re really going to go all the way down the rabbit hole of female empowerment, let’s have a female warrior who’s six months pregnant in battle.’
It doesn’t happen in our society — probably hasn’t happened for hundreds of years. But I guarantee you, back in the day, women had to fight for survival and protect their children, and it didn’t matter if they were pregnant. And pregnant women are more capable of being a lot more athletic than we, as a culture, acknowledge. I thought, ‘Let’s take the real boundaries off.’ To me, it was the last bastion that you don’t see. Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel — all these other amazing women come up, but they’re not moms and they’re not pregnant while they’re fighting evil.”
Avatar: The Way of Water Looks Set For the Biggest Opening Weekend of 2022
2022 was expected to be the year cinema came back strong after the Covid pandemic’s devastating impact on the industry. While there have certainly been moments of massive box office success, there have been just as many disappointments. However, Avatar: The Way of Water seems to be leaving the year on a high and is set to potentially deliver the biggest opening weekend since last December’s Spider-Man: No Way Home.
The latest projections for James Cameron’s Avatar sequel predict a $175 million domestic opening and a massive $350 million international haul, combining to put the film’s overall weekend gross somewhere north of $525 million. This is almost seven times the amount the original Avatar took when it was released in 2009 and went on to become the highest-grossing movie of all time.
This is all good news for Cameron, who is hoping to release at least three further sequels, but with Avatar: The Way of Water having a reported budget of between $350-400 million, the film has to be more than just a hit to turn a profit. However, securing a release in China has certainly helped the movie’s chances to blast up the box office charts and potentially challenge Top Gun: Maverick to become the highest-grossing movie of the year. At the very least, Cameron and Disney will hope to see Avatar: The Way of Water end its run in the top five-grossing movies of all time and set up the franchise’s future sequels.
