Twitter Is Absolutely Roasting The New Avatar 2 Concept Art

It's tough to win over the most brutal critic of all: Twitter.

Seemingly moments after the official account for Avatar and its upcoming sequels posted some (amazing) concept art for Avatar 2, the Twitterverse kicked into extreme smack-talking mode. We'll get into the specifics shortly, but first, let's discuss the concept art itself, which really is some stunning work.

The post promised that the in next chapter of the Avatar saga, "you won't just return to Pandora — you'll explore new parts of the world," and the concept art delivers on that promise. The first image, seen above, features a couple of the planet's natives, known as Na'vi, gazing out over a shallow, pristine sea while the sun sets on the horizon.

The second image depicts a nighttime scene with several Na'vi exploring the shallows of another body of water as a gigantic, luminescent Moon looms in the background, accompanied by several smaller satellites. Next, we have a scene with the same Moon in the background, its visibility diminished due to it still being daylight; a group of Na'vi riding mountain banshees are approaching a mysterious, cloud-shrouded island.

Finally, the last image gives us a Na'vi couple navigating another body of water on the backs of some Plesiosaur-looking creatures; Pandora's floating land masses are prominently featured here, as well as some kind of stunning natural rock formation.

In our humble opinion, the concept art is freaking brilliant — but nobody on Twitter is saying it isn't. The internet's denizens don't actually seem to have much of a problem with this artwork; no, their problem is with Avatar's sequels themselves, and the fact that they will soon exist.

Belated sequels to hit film shaven't done terribly well at the box office of late (we're looking at you, Terminator: Dark Fate), and while Avatar was a bigger hit than most and its sequels won't be quite as belated as some, a consistent theme of the derisive tweets leveled at the new concept art was that Avatar was... how can we put this delicately... not a memorable film, and not one that demanded a continuation of its story. Wrote user @BeardedSonOfNel, "Nobody cares. The first movie broke box office records, and I don't know a person that can name a character from that film. This is also a film that doesn't need sequels; it was fine on its own."

Some users took slightly more sarcastic approaches to their criticism, like @cygnertyc (who wrote, "Omg i'm so looking forward to this release I've been waiting my whole life for this") and @bornmush (who deadpanned, "only like 10 years behind schedule!").

Perhaps the biggest burn of all, though, was leveled by @joshweller, who was devastatingly parental in his assessment. "Someone needs to sit [director] James Cameron down, hold his hand, and say in soothing, calming tone 'there are literally three people excited about Avatar 2," he wrote. "It's going to be hard, but he needs to know. It's time."

There are plenty of reasons why we're worried about Avatar 2 and its three sequels slated for release between 2021 and 2027. Despite the fact that the first film spent nearly a decade as the reigning all-time box office champion, it just didn't seem to leave an impression on audiences. None if its characters became household names, its plot was never endlessly debated and discussed (except perhaps to compare it unfavorably to Dances with Wolves), and for all the times Avatar 2 has seen its release delayed, nobody seemed to really notice or care.

Perhaps even more worrying: Avatar's success was thanks largely to its groundbreaking CGI and stunning 3D (a new technique for shooting in the format was created specifically for the film). While Cameron has promised that the Avatar sequels will feature similar visual breakthroughs, audiences are pretty used to seeing the impossible rendered convincingly onscreen at this point — just looks at the film that snatched away Avatar's box office crown, Avengers: Endgame, for an example of this — and 3D fell out of favor with audiences some time ago.

Thanks to an unprecedented arrangement between Cameron and Fox (which has since been acquired by Disney), there will not be much opportunity to course-correct if Avatar 2 should underperform. The bulk of filming on Avatar 3 has already been completed, and while it's been reported that Avatar 4 and 5 have not officially been greenlit, this seems to have been contradicted by actress Sigourney Weaver, who said in 2018 that she had shot scenes for both films.

It could all spell disaster — unless, of course, Avatar 2 blows everyone right out of the theater. The flick hits the big screen on December 17, 2021.