Avatar: The Water Way crashed several projectors in Japan

The long-awaited sequel to Avatar: Water Road It did not start well in Japan: due to its own format a 48fps Many theaters reported glitches and projector freezes. In some cases they had to limit it to 24fps, but many shows were canceled and tickets refunded. While James Cameron’s new effort had its biggest launch ever in Japan, it ended up not even being the top-grossing movie of the weekend – it fell behind basketball anime called The First Slam Dunk.

The Water Way is one of the very few films released to date that uses the HFR (High frame rate), at a resolution of 48 fps. Over the years, adoption has been very limited: perhaps the most famous example is The Hobbit Trilogy by Peter Jackson. Old cinema projectors are not able to adequately support the technology – an upgrade to a newer model or, at best, the installation of new hardware is required. It may seem strange that the cinemas of an entire country (or a large part of it, at least) were caught unprepared, but, precisely so: the format is so pervasive that it is also acceptable.

Avatar 2 only uses 48 frames per second in its most frantic action sequences; In the rest of the scenes, the broadcast is still 48fps, but the frames of the 24fps version are simply duplicated. The argument is that this gives you, shall we say, the best of both worlds – lower fps in dialogues etc. to avoid the so-called “soap effect” that annoys many high frames in motion so you don’t miss a single detail – and avoid eye strain Or at least limit it in the case of 3D projections (as in the case of Avatar 2).

Technical problems aside, we can say that James Cameron’s film has very little to complain about: overall, in its first weekend It raised more than $430 millionwho puts it Already immediately in the top 10 highest-grossing films of the year. Notably, in its first weekend the original Avatar, which remains the highest-grossing movie in history (thanks to its return to theaters this summer, it once again surpassed Avengers: Endgame, with a total of $2.92 billion), grossing $241.6 million.