Avatar (2009)
WHAT WENT WRONG
Sad Boom Media
4.8 • 4.2K Ratings
🗓️ 22 December 2025
⏱️ 112 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Would you make love to an alien? Because James Cameron wants to know. Lizzie & Chris cap a James Cameron Christmas with perhaps his most polarizing film, Avatar. From epic spats to studio subterfuge and accusations of plagiarism, the journey to Pandora (and box office glory) begs the question: was it worth a seemingly self-imposed exile to a world that doesn't exist?
*CORRECTIONS: Contrary to Lizzie's assertion, Zoe Saldaña was not in any of the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels; thus, Chris's point that she was a relative unknown stands!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome back to what went wrong. Hello and welcome back to What Went |
| 0:20.3 | Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a pioneering and potentially a little problematic film from one of cinema's grumpiest masterminds. I'm one of your host, Lizzie Bassett, |
| 0:39.6 | here as always, with Chris Winterbauer and Chris. What is your holiday gift to our listeners this year? |
| 0:47.3 | Today we are discussing Avatar. In honor of the release of the third Avatar film, which will be coming out on December 19th, it's James Cameron movie. It is a movie he made. And no, no, we're going to dive into it. It is a really interesting, really interesting story. There are some really unusual elements to this story that I was not sort of expecting. And I'm really excited to talk about it because this is a movie that I think that I often forget about within his filmography, to be candid. Yeah. There are three movies of his that I often forget about. This is one of them. What are the other two? I forget about piranha too, because, you know, I've only seen it once. Sure. I often forget about true lies. |
| 1:28.9 | Oh, yeah. |
| 1:29.6 | You know what? |
| 1:30.1 | I do, too. |
| 1:30.9 | I don't think about true lies very much. |
| 1:33.0 | It's not that I don't think about it. |
| 1:34.1 | It's that I forget that it's him a lot of the time. Yeah. It's very unusual. I think true lies is in a weird way more of an outlier |
| 1:40.0 | than any of his other films, |
| 1:41.2 | because it's effectively a spoof. |
| 1:42.6 | Yeah, it's a comedy. |
| 1:44.0 | We will get to true lies. |
| 1:45.2 | We're not talking about it today. |
| 1:46.5 | Today we are talking about Avatar. We're going to Pandora. And Lizzie, I have to ask, had you seen Avatar before? And what were your thoughts upon watching or re-watching it for the podcast? I had seen Avatar before, of course. This came out in 2009 when we were sophomores in college, |
| 2:02.3 | juniors in college, somewhere around there. Yeah, I think it was junior year, the winter of 2009. |
| 2:07.4 | A dark time for all. You know, I'll just be very upfront about this. I do not care for this |
| 2:14.8 | franchise. I really didn't like this movie the first time that I saw it. I was like |
| 2:20.5 | angry at how much I did not like this movie when I saw it in theaters. Upon rewatching it, |
| 2:26.7 | this time for the podcast, I felt a similar rage burble up in my gut when I looked at the runtime |
| 2:33.2 | and remembered that it was two hours and 43 minutes long. |
... |
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