James Cameron’s Avatar is being rereleased in U.S. theaters this Friday, possibly to remind everyone that there’s a reason it was such an enormous cultural phenomenon ahead of the upcoming sequels (beginning with Avatar: The Way Of Water, coming in December), but a Deadline report says that there might be a surprise bonus beyond that for Na’vi who hop on their dragon things and fly over to the local theater this weekend. The movie has already been rereleased in Korea and France, and according to a bunch of French tweets, it now includes some footage of Le Way De Water—but, curiously, Deadline suspects that not every screening is getting the same footage and that some screenings aren’t getting the footage at all.
Disney (which now owns Avatar, since it bought 20th Century Fox) has not said anything about the bonus footage yet, either in international screenings or for the upcoming American screenings, but it makes sense that Mickey Mouse would want to add something extra to the movie. After all, the slightly expanded version of Spider-Man: No Way Home bumped the movie right back to the top of the box office charts at the beginning of this month, six months or so after it left theaters initially. Slipping in some The Way Of Water footage makes perfect sense, or at least a lot more sense than adding new scenes with Angourie Rice’s Betty Brant would in this case.
The one thing we know about this new footage is that everybody seems pretty excited about it, surprisingly proving—once again—that some people really did like Avatar and really are happy to see more from that world. The Avatar rerelease is happening this weekend, and The Way Of Water is coming to theaters on December 16.