Return to the world of Pandora from the comfort of your home when Avatar: the way of the water will be released on Disney Plus on June 7. But wait! Instead, if you have a Max account (the streaming service currently known as HBO Max, which will become Max on May 23), you can Also watch it there on the same day. Thank you previous distribution deals!
Avatar: The Way of WateR premiered last December, 13 years after James Cameron’s original film premiered in 2009. It followed the next generation of the Sully family, but most importantly it introduced a group of sentient space whales called the tulkun. The movie is just over three hours long, but if you’re watching it via streaming, you can pause anytime if you need to run to the bathroom. And when you consider how much water is in this movie, let’s just say that’s a likely scenario.
If you can’t wait to stream, Avatar: the way of the water can also be rented through Prime Video, YouTube and other rental outlets.
Any movie appearing simultaneously on two different streaming platforms is certainly a strange and surprising turn of events, but it makes sense that there’s something special going on for a movie as big as Avatar: the way of the water. The reason it appears on both Max and Disney Plus is because of Disney’s purchase of 20th Century Entertainment – the studio that produces the Avatar franchise.
While 20th Century Studios now falls under the Disney umbrella, that wasn’t the case the last time the company, then known as 20th Century Fox, negotiated a streaming rights contract. At the time, 20th Century agreed to let its movies stream exclusively on HBO Max, Warner Bros.’s streaming platform, because 20th Century didn’t have any of its own. However, now that the studios are owned by Disney, it has yet to fulfill its deal with Warner. While that deal is normally exclusive, it appears Disney negotiated it avatar2 landed on both streaming services, which is how we got this odd deal.
Anyway, congratulations, Avatar fans! Or as the Na’vi say: Congratulations, Avatar fans!