James Cameron has responded to criticism of his use of 3D and high frame rate in the Avatar movies – and it’s straight to the point.
“I think $2.3 billion says you might be wrong on that,” Cameron said in a new interview with Discussing Film. “Well, that’s the argument from authority. But the argument from artistic is: I happen to like it, and it’s my movie.”
Most of Avatar: The Way of Water and its new sequel, Fire and Ash, was shot at 48 frames per second, which is double the usual movie frame rate of 24 frames per second. This makes the scenes in question look particularly smooth.
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“I like what it does to smooth out the 3D experience,” Cameron elaborated. “If you want to get technical on this, we have a lot of different neurons that do a lot of different things, but we have dedicated neurons for parallax. So when people say they get eye strain watching 3D, it’s not eye strain. It’s brain strain, because we integrate into a stereoscopic perception of the world in our visual cortex.
“Those parallax-sensitive neurons can’t fire if the vertical edges of things are jumping,” he continued. “The brain can’t process that. So if we’re having a stroboscopic effect that’s degrading the 3D experience, then we’ll use high frame rate. It interpolates to a level that we actually can process 3D and then that brain strain goes away.”
Avatar: Fire and Ash takes us back to Pandora a year after the events of The Way of Water. Still living with the Metkayina as they grieve their son Neteyam, Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) find themselves facing a new threat in the form of the Mangkwan, a new, dangerous Na’vi tribe allied with Jake’s enemy Quaritch (Stephen Lang).
Avatar: Fire and Ash arrives in theaters on December 19. In the meantime, get up to speed with the biggest upcoming movies to add to your watchlist in 2026.
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