OAN Roy Francis
UPDATED 11:47 AM PT – Wednesday, December 28, 2022
Avatar director James Cameron reportedly cut 10 minutes of gun violence from his new movie Avatar: The Way of Water.
The director’s newest movie has a massive runtime of over just over three hours. Recently in an interview, Cameron revealed that the movie would have been even longer, but he decided to cut out 10 minutes of the movie due to gun violence.
“I actually cut about 10 minutes of the movie targeting gunplay action,” he said. “I wanted to get rid of some of the ugliness, to find a balance between light and dark.”
This comes as a turn around from the director based on his previous movies, including the first two Terminator movies that contained a lot of gunplay action in the films. The Terminator, considered by many as one of the greatest action films of all time, contains plenty of “gun violence.” The film propelled his career as a successful film director forward.
Now, Cameron is taking a different stance and said the reasoning behind his decision is that he does not want to “fetishize the gun.” He commented on the Terminator films he made, saying he’s not sure if he would make them today.
“I look back on some films that I’ve made, and I don’t know if I would want to make that film now,” he explained. “I don’t know if I would want to fetishize the gun, like I did on a couple of Terminator movies 30+ years ago, in our current world.”
The director further explained that the reason behind his change of course is due to what is happening in today’s world with regards to guns.
“What’s happening with guns in our society turns my stomach.” he said. “I’m happy to be living in New Zealand where they just banned all assault rifles.”
His comments were met with a lot of criticism, some people pointed to the fact that his new movie still has a lot of guns and some brutality in it.
Avatar: The Way of Water has just crossed the $1 Billion benchmark worldwide. Three additional films in the film series are expected to be released in the future.