The movie industry is a largely unpredictable beast, but one thing you can bank on is widely popular and commercially successful blockbuster being trashed as an overrated mess from the second you don’t have to take a trip to the theater in order to check it out. As if we needed any more examples, Avatar: The Way of Water has returned to the forefront of the cultural conversation with a bang.
We saw the exact same thing happen not too long ago when Black Panther: Wakanda Forever debuted on Disney Plus, with the Academy Award-winning Marvel Cinematic Universe sequel landing straight in the firing line from the very day it emerged on streaming. Of course, much like its predecessor, James Cameron’s The Way of Water was destined to suffer the same fate.
Never mind the fact that an eye-watering total of $2.3 billion at the box office makes it the third highest-grossing release in the history of cinema – indicating that there’s an awful lot of people out there who caught it on the big screen more than once – the floodgates of criticism have now been opened, just as we all expected they would.
To offer a minor shred of defense, The Way of Water isn’t going to play anywhere near as well on a TV as it does in its preferred format of IMAX 3D, and we’re not even going to acknowledge anyone who dares defy the laws of nature to see it for the first time on a cellphone. Big budget fantasies come, they conquer, and then they get burned to the ground at a later date; such is the way of the world.