Get Ready To Stream Avatar: The Way Of Water

Director James Cameron broke his own box office records for Titanic when the original Avatar was released in 2010. Over a decade later, Avatar: Way Of The Water also drew millions of people worldwide to theaters over the holiday season. As March 7, the sequel had earned a whopping $2.2 billion at the worldwide box office — and domestically, was on track to surpass Titanic’s $674 million gross.

Avatar 2 is the first of an expected four sequels to come, and this one in particular takes place in another region of Pandora years after the events of the original — instead of the jungles of Omaticaya, the drama takes place by the ocean (it is the way of the water, after all) with the Metkayina people. Zoe Saldana and Sam Worthington reprise their roles as Neytiri and Jake, respectively; they’re now the clan leaders with a full family, including an adopted daughter.

There’s a lot to catch up on. So much so, in fact, that Cameron gave Worthington a script he called Avatar 1.5 that filled in some of the events between the films for him to read up on before filming Avatar 2. “I said, ‘When do we shoot this one? Because this is amazing.’” Worthington told Collider of receiving the script from Cameron. “He goes, ‘No, no. That's just something I wrote over the past year to give you his backstory.’ And then I lent it to Zoe.”

When Will Avatar 2 Be Available To Stream?

Avatar: The Way of Water hit theaters on December 16, 2022, and for months, that was the only way to see it: in theaters. Now, Disney has finally announced when it’ll hit VOD: March 28. That means that soon, fans will be able to purchase digital copies from their favorite VOD platforms, like Vudu, Prime Video, and Apple TV.

Because it is a Disney property, Avatar: The Way of Water will also eventually be able to stream on Disney+ at a later date — but there’s no word yet on when exactly that’ll be.

If you can’t wait until the end of March to spend some time in the fictional land of Pandora, you can stream the original Avatar on Disney+, Amazon, or YouTube right now.

What Are Critics Saying About Avatar: The Way Of Water?

When the first Avatar film was released, it was met with skepticism despite its wide box office appeal. Brian Lowry at CNN thinks that people shouldn’t wait to stream the sequel and should instead head to a theater to bask in its cinematic glory. “Ultimately, though, The Way of Water melts away any skepticism that it might be too late or too long in its return to Pandora. For a franchise that popularized the line ‘I see you,’ the director has created a sequel that truly deserves to be seen, not from the comfort of the couch, but on the biggest screen you can find.”

Indiewire called it a “staggering improvement” from the original, while the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw was unmoved by the visual effects and the story overall. “The submarine world of this film is, in its way, its chief character and its whole point. The move from land- to sea-based existence is the way a new film was created,” he wrote. “But the sea world is imagined with a lot of cliche. Frankly, there isn’t a single interesting visual image and the whole thing has the non-briny smell of a MacBook Pro. Finding Nemo was more vivid. And what do we find aside from the high-tech visual superstructure? The floatingly bland plot is like a children’s story without the humour; a YA story without the emotional wound; an action thriller without the hard edge of real excitement.”

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