HE’s “B. Dog” (posted earlier today): “What’s missing? A sense of surprise. And the new trailer’s visuals, themes, dialogue, characters…none have changed. There’s a feeling of ‘haven’t we kinda seen this already?’ That said, they have to market this thing some way, right? So might as well go with ‘familiarity’ and a ‘Welcome back to the awe of Pandora’ strategy.

“I’m going to assume James Cameron and his writers have assembled some clever and compelling narrative suspense and structure under all this animated CGI stuff to drive more Avatar movies. I mean, one would hope. But it’s not evident in the trailers. At all.”

James Cameron to GQ‘s Zach Baron, as excerpted in a World of Reel post: [“Avatar: The Way Of Water is] very fucking [expensive]…the worst business case in movie history. It’ll have to be the third or fourth highest-grossing film in history [to become profitable]. That’s your threshold. That’s your break even.”

Ruimy: “Cameron has already mentioned that, if The Way of Water doesn’t break even (or earn roughly $800 million), he might stop making Avatar movies after the third, already completed one gets released.”

World of Reel commenter Richie Rich: “The story I’ve gathered from the trailer is that Jake and his family had to leave the forest and move in with the water people. So now they have to learn ‘the way of water’. And I’m sure some bad guys (who may or may not have been the ones who forced them out to the forest) will come to disrupt their new lives leading to Jake and family fighting with the water people against said bad guys.”