Directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese from the gritty 70s school of filmmaking have tendencies to make long movies that push the three hours. Tarantino also has a reputation for making long films. James Cameron, by comparison, is more of a genre filmmaker that dabbles more in sci-fi and action, but like those directors, his movies tend to run pretty long, with Avatar clocking in at 162 minutes, while Titanic ran a mighty 195 minutes. Now, it looks like his much-anticipated Avatar: The Way of Water will be sporting a runtime of 3 hours and 10 minutes, which is longer than the first movie by almost half an hour.

As told to Variety, Cameron feels the additional running time is necessary to expand on the film’s emotional content:

The goal is to tell an extremely compelling story on an emotional basis. I would say the emphasis in the new film is more on character,...