The essential technology of the movies hasn’t changed all that much since Thomas Edison’s day: A sequence of still images is projected onto an opaque surface in rapid succession, fooling the eye into thinking that it's seeing movement. We’ve added color, sound, and even a fake third dimension since then, but the basics have remained the same.

Every so often, though, the envelope gets pushed once more. The traditional 24-frames-per-second (fps) rate for film was determined to be the slowest possible to consistently fool the human eye. And because film stock was expensive, using the minimum required was financially sound. The shift to digital projection has eliminated that restriction, though, allowing for as many frames per second as your eye can gobble up. Even so, the vast majority of films are still stuck at 24fps.

But as James Cameron releases one of the most anticipated sequels of all time—Avatar: The Way of Water—that may be about to change. Let’s grab some reels and explore the quest to pump up frame rates.

Return To Middle-Earth

First, let's rewind a decade. Peter Jackson has always been on the forefront of film, going from making exploitation films in New Zealand to helming the Lord of the Rings trilogy. So when it was time to make an adaptation of Tolkien’s prequel novel, Jackson wanted to embrace the latest and create something truly special.

The Hobbit was shot in 3D high frame rate (HFR) using Red digital cameras that captured 48 images per second. Custom projection systems were installed in theaters to handle the playback, and the tech press was full of articles trumpeting the next big step in film technology.

What were the supposed benefits? In scenes where the camera or on-screen elements are moving quickly, this technology eliminates “strobing” effects and causes motion to look more natural and lifelike. It's also a way for theaters to differentiate themselves from at-home movie-watching, a big priority as the industry continues to shrink.

But on release, The Hobbit fell flat. Critics and audiences compared the new resolution to watching a cheap TV show. Depth of field—the way objects in the background seem blurry compared to the foreground—was completely blown out, leaving watchers unable to focus on the important parts of the scene, because everything was equally crisp. The increased clarity of HFR disrupted the visual shortcuts that make film engrossing.

By the time the second Hobbit movie, The Desolation Of Smaug, was released, HFR was barely mentioned in the movie’s marketing. Jackson also dialed back on the clarity and saturation of the scenes, bringing the visuals closer to standard film. Even so, response was muted. The grand experiment seemed to be a failure. If one of the most popular directors of the era couldn’t make it look good, what hope did anyone else have?

A few other directors tried—most notably Ang Lee, who shot 2019’s Gemini Man at a ridiculous 120 frames per second—but for the most part, 24 frames per second looked to be here to stay. That is, until another ambitious creator opened the gates again.

Under The Sea

The son of an artist and an engineer, James Cameron is another lifelong innovator who has pushed the technology of film in myriad ways. He pioneered digital morphing with Terminator 2, 3D fusion camera rigs with Ghosts of the Abyss, and performance capture and digital asset management for the first Avatar. He’s a perfectionist at heart, always looking to improve on the tools that he uses to tell stories.

Cameron has been working on Avatar: The Way of Water since 2010, and the dozen years in between have seen a number of seismic changes in the film industry. At one point, the director said that Avatar sequels would not use HFR technology. But between 2019 and this year, he seems to have changed his mind, following an interesting little experiment.

Earlier in 2022, the first Avatar film was re-released in theaters, this time in 4K HFR. Although the film wasn’t originally shot in that format, Cameron’s team employed a company called TrueCut Motion to perform “motion grading” on the entire thing, using AI to create interpolative frames in between every two existing ones. The end result is impressive: While it doesn’t significantly change the movie, it’s definitely noticeable. The Pandora scenes especially have a lot more depth and clarity.

Avatar: The Way Of Water will be Cameron’s first film shot in native HFR. But the innovative director is taking some interesting steps that are possible only with digital media to eliminate some of the issues that The Hobbit had.

Speaking at the Busan International Film Festival in Korea, Cameron revealed that while Avatar 2’s action sequences will be lensed and projected at 48 frames per second to bring out all of the detail in the 3D environments—most particularly in underwater scenes—more static scenes, such as conversations, will simply have their frames doubled, so they will functionally run at the standard 24fps. “For shots of just people standing around talking, [high frame rate] works against us because it creates a kind of a hyper realism in scenes that are more mundane, more normal. And sometimes we need that cinematic feeling of 24fps,” Cameron said.

Learning how to use a new tool always comes with some growing pains. Early color films were lurid and unrealistic until new chemical processes allowed for better reproduction. The first movies with sound were scratchy and tinny. Various attempts at 3D projection resulted mainly in headache-inducing messes. So it’s not surprising that HFR took time to come into its own.

One thing that might give The Way Of Water an advantage over Jackson’s films is the unreality of the environment. The world of Middle-Earth was a lot like ours—green forests, amber fields, mountains. These are things that we interact with in the real world and have seen hundreds of times in movies, so our brains have developed expectations for how they look. But the world of Pandora, where most of the in Avatar is an alien place, something we’ve seen in only one other movie. Combine that with the advances in technology and the story might be different this time around.

Thomas Edison believed that the ideal frame rate for motion pictures was 46fps, pretty close to what HFR provides. It’s funny that modern technology has finally come around to the opinion that the originator of the form had over a century later, but sometimes things take a little polishing before they’re ready for the big screen.

You can see Avatar: The Way of Water in theaters starting Friday, Dec. 16. It will almost certainly be available to stream on Disney+ after a period of theater exclusivity (the timing is not yet announced).