Should Avatar 3 be shown with an intermission?

This year's historical epic The Brutalist — a major contender at the Oscars — ran for three and a half hours, but delivered a theatre-like interval at the midpoint. With the news this week that James Cameron expects Avatar 3 to run even longer than its 192-minute predecessor, could the path carved by The Brutalist show the way forward for Disney's sci-fi franchise?

Within the context of The Brutalist, an interval worked perfectly. The intermission was written into the DNA of Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold's script and Corbet stood firm when others suggested that he didn't need the break. It plays into The Brutalist's embrace of old school filmmaking techniques, such as the VistaVision visual approach, as intermissions were commonplace in the middle of the 20th century.

That raises the question of whether an interval would be useful for Avatar. It's certainly a very different proposition to the hefty historical storytelling of The Brutalist, which has both of its feet planted very much in the real world. But it is certainly equally epic in terms of how long it requires cinemagoers to remain in their seats.

"Movie 3 will actually be a little bit longer than movie 2," Cameron told Empire recently, suggesting that ideas cut from the first act of Avatar: The Way of Water will be added to this third film — entitled Avatar: Fire and Ash. With a running time likely to exceed that of The Brutalist, which is a mere 201 minutes without its interval, Fire and Ash is sure to test the endurance — and bladder capacity — of its viewers.

Read more: Should more movies have intermissions? The Brutalist cast weigh in (Yahoo Entertainment, 4 min read)

On the face of it, an intermission would be the perfect solution to this problem. Give everyone a break halfway through to use the bathroom, refill the popcorn buckets, and prepare for the inevitable action spectacle of the final hour or so of the film.

However, the success of the Avatar films is largely rooted in the immersive nature of our journeys into James Cameron's world of Pandora. By utilising cutting-edge technology and some seriously impressive world-building, the previous two Avatar adventures have allowed audiences to transport themselves into another world. Nobody does escapism on the big screen quite like Cameron.

That's a world which takes time to key into — particularly when audiences are viewing the whole thing through a pair of 3D glasses. An interval will inevitably send audience members crashing back into the real world, so they'll have to adjust once again to Pandora when the film starts again. That's more of an ask for Avatar than it is for a movie set within the history of the real world. Sci-fi feels as if it's inherently less suited to an interval than straightforward drama is.

Read more: James Cameron explains Avatar 3's ominous title (Digital Spy, 2 min read)

But for the exact same reasons, Avatar adventures can feel like a challenge. These are long movies set in a dense world of interconnected tribes with different beliefs and ideas. Cameron's epic sci-fi tales are enormous and exciting, but they also have the potential to be exhausting. A chance to spend 10 minutes away from the screen could be the respite audiences need to keep them on board and engaged for the final act.

It seems unlikely that Cameron will look to include an interval in Avatar 3. He's no stranger to lengthy movies, after all, and he hasn't utilised an intermission before. There's also no suggestion that he wrote an interval into the Avatar 3 script, whereas The Brutalist did so — ensuring the intermission felt organic to the story rather than something bolted on as a way to sell more snacks.

However, it's entirely possible that audiences will find themselves absolutely begging for that intermission when the clock ticks over into the fourth hour of the movie. Suddenly, that bucket of fizzy drink or pre-film coffee might not seem like the best idea.

Avatar: Fire and Ash will be released in UK cinemas on 19 December.