Disney’s marketing blitz for ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ isn’t as innovative as the film—and that’s its genius

Avatar: The Way of Water will be released in theaters officially on December 16. For the film to break even for Disney, director James Cameron has admitted that the sequel to his 2009 hit—the highest-grossing film of all time—would have to make more than $2 billion at the global box office.

To underline the point: Just to break even, this movie is going to have to be the third- or fourth-highest-grossing film of all time. For some context, the top-grossing film of 2022 is Top Gun: Maverick ($1.48 billion globally), and it currently ranks at No. 11 on the all-time list.

This all means that a helluva lot of people will need to be buying tickets, probably more than once, for Avatar 2 to reach its lofty goals.

Traditionally, this would require a robust, complex, and broadly scaled marketing strategy. Even then, this film is facing a handful of unique challenges to achieve its ambitions. There’s the 13-year gap between its release and the original. There’s the general pop cultural shift toward the cinematic and streaming universes of Marvel and Star Wars, and away from weekly theater-going.

However, leading up to the release of what aims to be a historic blockbuster, one way or the other, Disney appears to be utilizing the least-popular tool in the marketing playbook: restraint. Yet that just may be its genius.

Back in 2009, as Cameron and 20th Century Fox were introducing us to the world of Pandora for the first time, they used every outlet available to do it. There were marketing partnerships and product tie-ins galore, enlisting the likes of Mattel, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, LG, and Panasonic. They debuted an Avatar video-game trailer as the film was set to launch. Four months before the film’s December 18 release, they even created Avatar Day, screening 16 minutes of film footage in IMAX theaters around the globe on August 21.

Looking around this week, mere days before Avatar: The Way of Water’s premiere, it’s actually hard to find any marketing beyond the teasers and trailers. In terms of brand partnerships, Kellogg’s has adapted Frosted Flakes to Pandora Flakes (featuring blueberry blue moons!), and Mercedes-Benz created both an electric concept car dubbed AVTR and a new ad aligning its sustainability goals with Avatar’s underlying ecological messages. This is . . . not much.

To compare, let’s look at the recent Black Panther sequel Wakanda Forever, which had brand and product tie-ins with McDonald’s, Lexus, Adidas, Sprite Zero, Target, Procter & Gamble, Mastercard, Mac Cosmetics, the NBA, and Xbox. Adidas even created Wakanda Forever-inspired workouts in its Runtastic app.

Curious then, that Disney—with eyes on breaking all-time box office records—isn’t carpet-bombing culture with all Avatar everything right now. Or is it?

If the first Avatar was hailed as a new high-water mark in film technology and innovation (for its visual effects and advancements in 3D), the marketing for it, between Avatar Day and how it tapped into the still-nascent culture of social media, was similarly feted. But after more than a decade, movie marketing has evolved significantly. And with The Way of Water already being celebrated for breakthrough new underwater motion-capture tech that Cameron invented for the sequel, it’s fair to question whether the marketing behind it matches those levels.

Disney is about as sophisticated a marketer as you’ll find on Earth, Pandora, or any other planet. So there is obviously a method to this seemingly understated marketing madness. I think it goes back to how Cameron originally stoked audience curiosity and excitement 13 years ago.

A few of the significant challenges that Avatar faced was that it was an original story, not adapted from preexisting intellectual property that people knew and loved. But instead of relying on the story and characters, Cameron and 20th Century Fox bet that they could attract audiences with the unprecedented 3D visuals and immersive world of the film’s setting, Pandora. Hence the IMAX preview months before the film launched. The word-of-mouth hype that these screenings sparked was the foundation of the film’s record-breaking box office success.

Now The Way of Water comes along about 20 Marvel Cinematic Universe films later. It’s been so long that Cameron himself has acknowledged a general narrative hovering above the film’s release: Does anyone still care about Avatar? Do you even know who Jake Sully is? As the filmmaker told The Hollywood Reporter, “There’s skepticism in the marketplace around, ‘Oh, did it ever make any real cultural impact?’”

Cameron is, if anything, confident in his skills. Back in 1997, he told Howard Stern that he forfeited all of his earnings in order to finish making Titanic, which was running over budget. He knew in 2009 that once audiences experienced even a 16-minute amuse-bouche of Avatar, it would build a bigger appetite for the whole meal.

So Disney is betting that the film itself will be this sequel’s most important marketing tool. Its opening gambit was to rerelease the original in theaters in September, which earned an impressive $76 million at the box office. Meanwhile, even the trailers and teasers are, once again, small on story and plot and big on vibes. This is what you’re in for. This is only a taste of what it will look like.

It doesn’t hurt that the company has been not-so-subtly keeping those vibes alive and well by opening Pandora: The World of Avatar theme park inside Walt Disney World in 2017, which has proven to be one of the park’s most popular attractions in the past five years.

The studio also knows that the film will be in a lot of theaters for a long time, enough to build excitement far beyond opening weekend. The original Avatar opened its theatrical run with a $79 million weekend, and dropped off just 8% per week for 10 weeks. Cameron told THR that he’ll know if the sequel is a true hit by the third weekend. “You’re not going to know by the first weekend,” he said. “Titanic didn’t work that way. Avatar didn’t work that way.”

See you on New Year’s Day.