James Cameron Is Sick Of Glamourising Gun Violence So He Removed 10 Minutes Of Footage From Avatar: The Way Of Water

James Cameron has an alternate cut of Avatar: The Way of Water which is longer than the version that’s now in the cinemas.

The Avatar sequel, the first of four instalments, currently clocks in at 192 minutes but its original runtime was 10 minutes longer.

Speaking to Esquire Middle East, Cameron said he expunged footage depicting gun violence — because he’s sick of fetishising firearms in his action scenes.

“I actually cut about 10 minutes of the movie targeting gunplay action,” said Cameron, 68. “I wanted to get rid of some of the ugliness, to find a balance between light and dark. You have to have conflict, of course. Violence and action are the same thing, depending on how you look at it. This is the dilemma of every action filmmaker, and I’m known as an action filmmaker.”

Cameron said earlier in the interview, “I look back on some films that I’ve made, and I don’t know if I would want to make that film now. I don’t know if I would want to fetishise the gun, like I did on a couple of  Terminator movies 30-plus years ago, in our current world. What’s happening with guns in our society turns my stomach.”

He added, “I’m happy to be living in New Zealand where they just banned all assault rifles two weeks after that horrific mosque shooting a couple of years ago.”

Besides the Terminator movies, Cameron’s other gun-heavy actioners include 1986’s Aliens and 1994’s True Lies.

Even though the violence in The Way of Water is, er, watered down, US film classifiers still think it’s a tad too violence, giving it a PG13 rating for “sequences of strong violence and intense action, partial nudity and some strong language”. In Singapore, IMDA (Infocomm Media Development Authority) handed it a PG13 rating as well, for “Some Violence”.

Since its global roll-out (starting on Dec 14), The Way of Water — which reportedly cost US$350 million (S$471 mil) — has raked in US$955.1 million (as of Monday) to become the third-highest grosser of 2022 (after Top Gun: Maverick’s US$1.48 billion and Jurassic Park: Dominion’s US$1 billion) and the fourth-biggest film of the pandemic era (The Way of Water is slightly behind Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’ US$955.7 million).

The original Avatar still holds the record for the highest-grossing movie worldwide with US$2.9 billion, followed by Avengers: Endgame’s US$2.7 billion and Titanic’s US$2.1 billion. To recoup its cost, The Way of Water has to out-gross Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ US$2.07 billion (fourth place) and Avengers: Infinity War’s US$2.05 billion (fifth place).

Despite the impressive numbers, The Way of Water is still a long way from breaking even, at least by Cameron’s estimation. He told GQ previously, the “f***ing expensive” movie needs to “be the third or fourth highest-grossing film in history” to be profitable.

Avatar: The Way of Water (PG13) is now in cinemas.