James Cameron cut 10 minutes of gun violence out of “Avatar: The Way of Water” because the director says he is done fetishizing guns.
“I actually cut about 10 minutes of the movie targeting gunplay action,” Cameron said in an interview with Esquire Middle East. “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.”
Previously in the interview, Cameron said: “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 fetishize 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.”
Cameron, who used to live in Malibu, relocated to New Zealand during the pandemic in 2021.
“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,” Cameron said.
In other “Avatar” news, the film “has now earned $105.5 million in Imax global box office in less than two weeks — the fastest film to hit the $100 million mark in Imax since April 2019,” according to Imax.
“Avatar: the Way of Water” is only the ninth film in Imax history to exceed $100 million in global box office. To date, Imax has accounted for 11.4% of the film’s global gross on only a fraction of its total screens.
