Avatar: The Way of Water is a 2022 American epic science fiction film co-produced, co-edited, and directed by James Cameron, who co-wrote the screenplay with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver from a story the trio wrote with Josh Friedman and Shane Salerno.

It follows a blue-skinned humanoid Na'vi named Jake Sully (Worthington) as he and his family, under renewed human threat, seek refuge with the aquatic Metkayina clan of Pandora, a habitable exomoon on which they live.

Aware of the danger posed by Spider's knowledge, Jake and his family relocate themselves from the Omatikaya to Pandora's eastern sea, inhabited by the Metkayina clan.

There, the family assimilates with the Metkayina: Kiri develops a spiritual bond with the sea, Jake and Neytiri assist Chief Tonowari and his wife Ronal, while Lo'ak befriends Tsireya, their daughter.

Later, Kiri links to the Metkayina's underwater Spirit Tree and meets Grace in a vision, but suffers a seizure during the link-induced trance and nearly drowns.

Jake summons his friends Norm Spellman and Max Patel for help, who diagnose Kiri with epilepsy and warn that she cannot connect to the Spirit Tree again.

[70] New crew members include cinematographer Russell Carpenter, who worked with Cameron on True Lies (1994) and Titanic (1997), and Aashrita Kamath, who will act as art director on all four sequels.

"[65][81][82][18][78][83] Cameron added that they had "worked out every beat of the story across all three films so it all connects as one, sort of, three-film saga", a creative process that was inspired by his experiences in the writing room of his television series Dark Angel.

[92]In a December 2019 interview, Lang said his character was always meant to return in the sequels, as Cameron had shared with him "that Quaritch had a future" while shooting the original film.

[99] Although the nature of her character was originally unknown, the following month Cameron said Ronal was "part of the Sea People, the reef people", in reference to the Na'vi clan of Metkayina, making Avatar 2 Winslet's first role via performance capture, or motion capture altogether, which she was looking forward to; since she insisted on performing all of her character's movements herself, she, like the child cast, had to learn free diving for the film.

[14] In May 2018, Saldaña said filming was "kind of only halfway done" and that the crew is "about [to finish] motion capture production on the [second and third] movies, and then after that, they go straight into pre-production for the live-action part that would shoot for six months in New Zealand.

After their arrival, Cameron and 55 other crew members who had traveled to New Zealand started a 2-week government-supervised isolation period at a hotel in Wellington before they would resume filming.

[128][129][130] In July 2022, the New Zealand Film Commission disclosed that the Avatar sequels had received over NZ$140 million worth of public funding through the country's Screen Production Grant.

[133][132] In December 2022, Wētā FX's VFX producer David Conley described Avatar 2 as the biggest visual effects project that the company had ever undertaken, totalling nearly 3.3 billion thread powers.

[153][157] Disney extensively promoted Avatar: The Way of Water across multiple media platforms, including merchandising, consumer products, theme parks and advertising.

[158] At the 2022 CinemaCon,[159] the new title for the sequel was officially announced and the first teaser trailer was debuted at the event,[160] along with four new first look images, showing off the adventures of the Na'vi on and off the coasts of Pandora.

[165][166] Grant Ridner of GQ commented: "The trailer features minimal dialogue and primarily focuses on shots of the cerulean Pandora and its residents, as well as indigenous flora and fauna.

According to Russ Burlingame of Comic Book Resources, the trailer was edited due to "public sentiments to avoid glorifying gun violence" as Lightyear released after the Robb Elementary School shooting incident,[170] while TheWrap's Drew Taylor opined that the change was made on the request of the Motion Picture Association for attaching the trailer with PG-rated films.

In China, Disney partnered with JD.com and Alipay for advertising, while Razer Inc. launched the Yaqi Orochi V2 Avatar computer mouse in the country themed after the film.

[197] The 2023 Hollywood Professional Association Tech Retreat revealed that 1,065 individual Digital Cinema Packages (DCPs) were created for the film's theatrical release.

Additionally, Disney's distribution team invented a new system to create and keep track of the numerous versions as well as a cloud-based DCP mastering tool.

[219][220] Deadline Hollywood calculated the film's net profit as $531.7 million, accounting for production budgets, marketing, talent participations and other costs; box office grosses and home media revenues placed it first on their list of 2022's "Most Valuable Blockbusters".

[252] Variety critic Owen Gleiberman praised the film as a "dizzyingly spectacular sequel" with "miraculously sustained" combat sequences, "scenes that will make your eyes pop, your head spin and your soul race" and "state-of-the-art 3D (never in-your-face, just images that look and feel sculpted) [that] makes the film's every underwater glide feel as experiential as one that you're literally on".

[256] Entertainment Weekly critic Leah Greenblatt summarized her review of The Way of Water saying that it "created its own whole-cloth reality, a meticulous world-building as astonishing and enveloping as anything we've ever seen on screen — until that crown is passed, inevitably, in December 2024, the projected release date for Avatar 3".

[10] The New Yorker critic Anthony Lane opined: "The film is more than three hours long, some of it dangerously close to dawdling; not until the final third does Cameron apply the whip and remind us that, in the choreographing of action sequences, he remains unsurpassed.

[259] San Francisco Chronicle reviewer Mick LaSalle called it "a one-hour story rattling around in a 192-minute bag", while acknowledging that "it looks pretty good", incorporating "one of the best uses of 3-D to date, with visuals that seem to have been conceived in three dimensions".

[260] The Telegraph critic Robbie Collin said that the film "has no plot, no stakes and atrocious dialogue" and that "for all its world-building sprawl, The Way of Water is a horizon-narrowing experience – the sad sight of a great filmmaker reversing up a creative cul-de-sac".

Cast members from previous films, including Worthington, Saldaña, Lang, Weaver, Pounder, Winslet, Curtis, Ribisi, Moore, Rao, Gerald, Dalton, Bliss, Champion, Bass, and Geljo, have all been announced to return while Oona Chaplin, Michelle Yeoh, and David Thewlis will be playing new characters.

"It looks like with the momentum that the film has now that we'll easily pass our break even in the next few days, so it looks like I can't wiggle out of this and I'm gonna have to do these other sequels," Cameron said in January 2023, adding: "I know what I'm going to be doing the next six or seven years".

[281] It was also confirmed that Brendan Cowell will reprise his role as Captain Mick Scoresby and will also feature the return of Payakan, the Tulkun who befriends Lo'ak.