Avatar: The Way of Water | 16 DEC 2022 | Don't worry guys, critics like it

[Reddroast]

10 minutes ago, Elessar said:

 

Being from the region and having connections with people who would help run this event (technically a family member has them.)

I'm surprised there wasn't any local coverage

[Deep Wang]

4 minutes ago, Porthos said:

 

Well, nearly all Star Wars trailers ever since TFA for one.  On the TV side, The Book of Boba Fett was a notorious example here of not selling the type of story being told and hiding a particularly important piece of the storytelling when it came to setting expectations of what was actually gonna happen.

 

That being said there is the example of The Last Jedi. That was pretty much Exactly What It Said On the Tin.

 

But it's also something of a commentary of how the spoiler-phobic nature of fans are being more and more catered to where the folks who say "I don't want to know anything about a movie" are actually being given more weight than perhaps they should.

 

I admit a certain irony that I'm mostly pointing to vibes and feelings within fandom here and not citing many concrete examples outside of Star Wars, but, well A] I'm incredibly focused on SW (nearly to the point of parody ) and B] I'm also pretty busy elsewhere on the forum (in the Streaming Tracking thread) so I can't really point to too many examples off hand.

 

What I can say is that this isn't a complaint unique to SW fans, as I've seen it casually in other conversations.  But since it is a casual observation I admittedly can't point to hard and fast examples, so apologies in advance.

 

(also apologies for any thread derailment that might be happening because of this observation)

 

 

It's especially funny given that the trailer for T2 gave away what could have been one of the biggest twists of all time.  Trailers back then gave away stuff literally all the time, but most of the hype I remember for that movie, was the fact that the bad terminator is now the good terminator.  

 

There's a balance to giving the audience something compelling to make them want to go, and not giving away the whole farm.  Obviously, there was a lot more to T2 than the twist (I mean it was resolved in the first act, but can you image not knowing??), but it was a HUGE talking point leading up to release.  I was only...uh 12(?) at the time, but I still remember it everywhere.  They couldn't stop talking about it!

 

[Porthos]

4 minutes ago, Deep Wang said:

It's especially funny given that the trailer for T2 gave away what could have been one of the biggest twists of all time.  Trailers back then gave away stuff literally all the time, but most of the hype I remember for that movie, was the fact that the bad terminator is now the good terminator.  

 

There's a balance to giving the audience something compelling to make them want to go, and not giving away the whole farm.  Obviously, there was a lot more to T2 than the twist (I mean it was resolved in the first act, but can you image not knowing??), but it was a HUGE talking point leading up to release.  I was only...uh 12(?) at the time, but I still remember it everywhere.  They couldn't stop talking about it!

 

 

Yep, I was thinking about T2 as well!  The "Good Terminator" was in fact an incredible selling point, as was the revolutionary sfx.  One fed off the other and box office (as well as movie) magic was born.

[MikeQ]

I'm not too concerned with the marketing of the film and whether or not it has a "hook" - though I understand the observations.

 

My sense has been that the overall performance of the film will, once again, hinge on whether the film is an incredible visual experience that resonates emotionally with broad audiences, in the way that the first did. It needs do so in order to be able to reach the stratospheric heights of the first.  I consider the opening weekend to be less important, especially since it is a December holiday opener again (where the exact parameters of "opening weekend" for films are less meaningful, I would say).

 

Peace,

Mike

[Deuce66]

Dolby posted the trailer in 4K on Youtube, not perfect but better. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[CaptNathanBrittles]

59 minutes ago, Porthos said:

 

That being said there is the example of The Last Jedi. That was pretty much Exactly What It Said On the Tin.

 

 

Not really. The trailers promised a serious epic. They showed none of the abysmal comedy that permeated the movie and deflated the serious moments.

Edited November 3, 2022 by CaptNathanBrittles

[Deep Wang]

2 hours ago, hw64 said:

The only real advantage of frontloading like that is as a safety blanket if you think the movie is going to be mediocre or shit, in which case you want to cram as many gullible people into the opening weekend as possible; I don't think that's a danger here.

 

If you want to have a conversation about Avatar being "too big to fail" we can.  WOTW is gonna be just fine because it's gonna clear $2b like it was nothing, even if it wasn't good.  Quality, in this case, has nothing to do with it.  So maybe they decided to not show anything or whatever.  

 

However, a trailer has one job, to sell you on a movie.   The more people you can pack in on OW the better, whether your movie is great or terrible.  Obviously it does help more when your movie is terrible, as we just saw with Halloween. 

 

Literally none of the die-hard avatar (die-harvatars?) stans in this thread would complain if A2 opened over $200m, so it seems weird to try and justify why that is actually not good?

[Porthos]

19 minutes ago, Deep Wang said:

However, a trailer has one job, to sell you on a movie.   The more people you can pack in on OW the better, whether your movie is great or terrible. 

 

Something to consider is if it's great and a lot of people saw it OW, a movie's WOM spreads that much faster!

 

We're seeing something of a non-movie example here with Andor.  WOM is really good, but the small base of people talking about it means that the WOM isn't getting out as much as quickly as it could.

 

Conversely, the WOM of House of the Dragon is also really good.  But because the base of viewers was larger, it's WOM spread out more quickly/deeply.

 

Not that this should be a problem for A2.  Just noting that rate of change (ie WOM) is great, but it's even greater when starting from a larger base.

[WittyUsername]

I don’t think Avatar is even enough of an established brand rat the moment to do the mystery box idea, and I’m not entirely convinced that’s what Disney is going for either. They probably just figure that the main hook of this movie is Pandora, so when it comes to the story, they don’t feel a need to show anymore than the bare minimum.

Edited November 3, 2022 by WittyUsername

[YSLDC]

This is the one movie you'll can sit back and enjoy the ride instead of diving into reception from the Internet. The internet delivered a collective "Sigh" when the re-release was announced and yet it made $76M in 3 weeks. 

[hw64]

2 hours ago, Deep Wang said:

 

If you want to have a conversation about Avatar being "too big to fail" we can.  WOTW is gonna be just fine because it's gonna clear $2b like it was nothing, even if it wasn't good.  Quality, in this case, has nothing to do with it.  So maybe they decided to not show anything or whatever.  

 

However, a trailer has one job, to sell you on a movie.   The more people you can pack in on OW the better, whether your movie is great or terrible.  Obviously it does help more when your movie is terrible, as we just saw with Halloween. 

 

Literally none of the die-hard avatar (die-harvatars?) stans in this thread would complain if A2 opened over $200m, so it seems weird to try and justify why that is actually not good?

 

I never said it wouldn't be good to have a potentially bigger opening weekend, I'm just saying that I'm convinced that the movie's word-of-mouth is going to be positive enough to eventually capture the interests of all of the people who would have seen Avatar 2 on opening weekend if they'd have been given a better narrative hook, so even if I'd have preferred for them to have put more narrative hooks out there to placate those parts of the audience, I think the effect on the box office is going to be pretty negligible.

 

And while I agree that having a bigger opening weekend is better in pretty much every normal scenario, I think that there's a decent argument to be made that one of the key components of both Titanic and Avatar's huge success was the concept of "underpromising and overdelivering"; audiences were not sold at all on either of those movies prior to their release, and the massive gap between pre-release expectations and the actual movies themselves was a key driver of the incredibly positive word-of-mouth that both movies received.

 

For pretty much any other movie, it'd be a stupid idea and aiming for a higher opening weekend would be the only logical strategy, but he's managed to pull it off twice in a row now under very similar circumstances, so if it is a deliberate strategy, then as bold and as foolish as it might seem, it might well pay off.

 

It's not like they would be deliberately tanking the opening weekend in the wild hope that word-of-mouth would eventually win back the audience that they themselves threw away; it's just a minor thing, and the eventual benefits of not playing their hand earlier could well outweigh the slightly higher opening weekend that a clearer narrative picture would entail. With every movie, there are things that could be done to increase the opening weekend that aren't simply because they're not seen as beneficial in the long term (see e.g. not revealing Tobey and Andrew in the marketing for No Way Home last year), and this is the same thing.

Edited November 4, 2022 by hw64

[interiorgatordecorator]

was kinda "meh" after the first watch, but the new trailer has really been growing on me after a couple of rewatches

Edited November 4, 2022 by interiorgatordecorator

[Borobudur]

11 hours ago, NCsoft said:

So how likely do we think a third trailer is on the way?

I didn't think there would be one but after seeing this new trailer, not so sure anymore.

It just seems to me that a lot has been withheld and most if not all the scenes seem like they are from the first half of the movie, the vibe feels so different from the final trailer for the original that I think there is room for a final trailer.

I do think there should be another final trailer, probably sometime before film premiere, to highlight the early reaction, some human characters, and more importantly, the 3D!

[adaros]

After last bad news about Black Adam ban in China I'm keeping my predictions of Avatar 2 boxoffice without China & Russia.

[stripe]

Do we know when's the premiere of the film? When will we have first reactions?

[efialtes76]

4 hours ago, stripe said:

Do we know when's the premiere of the film? When will we have first reactions?

Monday 12th,7pm,LA.

 

[Deuce66]

If Youtube is representative of the other digital outlets, the trailer has already surpassed the teaser in terms of views on the Avatar channel. That must be a good sign. 

 

[Deuce66]

"It's an epic, lucid, dreamlike, wonderful experience".

 

James Cameron 

 

 

Edited November 4, 2022 by Deuce66

[Deep Wang]

2 minutes ago, Deuce66 said:

"It's an epic, lucid, dreamlike, wonderful experience".

 

James Cameron 

 

 

 

[WittyUsername]

The trailer has a lot more likes on YT than the teaser.