Max, formerly known as HBO Max, has already soared to the top of the Nielsen charts with James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water. Now, the streaming platform has announced that it will also host the original 2009 Avatar this August — so that everyone can fondly remember unobtanium, Michelle Rodriguez in warpaint, and why Na’vi Jake Sully has more than four fingers.
According to the tweet, Avatar will hit the streamer on Aug. 17, among other films premiering this month, including American Gangster, The Departed, and a series that follows the most hardened criminal of all: Freddy Krueger.
For anyone wondering why Avatar is going to Max when Disney now owns the franchise: It likely relates to a streaming deal between HBO and the once-named 20th Century Fox before Disney acquired it in 2019.
This is why Avatar: The Way of Water has been playing on both Disney Plus and Max in recent months. The double dip helped the sequel reach a whopping 1,941 million minutes viewed when it premiered on both services in early June, according to Nielsen. During that week, it bested silver medalist Manifest on Netflix by 400 million minutes, which equates to 761 more years of viewing!
James Cameron can’t keep breaking records like this, or 2025’s Avatar 3 will end up being the final movie anyone sees for the rest of humanity.
We’re glad that completists will have access to the first Avatar on Max, allowing them to better understand the sequel. However, in our opinion, The Way of Water surpasses the original in every aspect, making it largely redundant. The action, the CGI, the character work, the story — everything is better and more interesting in the sequel, likely because Jake Sully is no longer the narrative’s focal point.
You see, Jake Sully is boring. But his children must live in the shadow of his great deeds and also conform to a foreign society just because Jake wants to hide rather than fight his nemesis, which is not so boring. Even explaining the setup of Way of Water is more riveting than anything shown in the first film — which also contains lines like, “That’s right! Who’s bad?!”
Avatar will stream on Max in about two weeks, but something tells us that people will be drawn in by The Way of Water far more often.