The title card for Avatar: The Way of Water has finally been revealed, and in doing so, the movie offers a payoff for an incredible Saturday Night Live skit about the original James Cameron film. In all likelihood, the title card wasn’t made with the Saturday Night Live skit in mind, and it being able to relate to it at all is most likely just a coincidence. Even so, the fact that The Way of Water’s title card can be connected to it at all, even tangentially, is something to think about.
Avatar has been the subject of many jokes and critiques in the years following its release, and one notable joke has been making fun of the movie for using the Papyrus font, which is commonly cited as being an inferior and ugly font. In 2017, the joke was the focus of a Saturday Night Live skit where a man named Steven, played by Ryan Gosling, was obsessed with how a blockbuster film like Avatar could use Papyrus for its font. The skit even ended with the title of the skit, “Papyrus”, being written in Comic Sans - another font that has a reputation for being ugly - as if to say that Papyrus is such a bad font that it shouldn’t even be written as a word in a nice font.
Avatar’s use of Papyrus has been the subject of a lot of mockeries, and Avatar: The Way of Water is immediately paying that off with the reveal of its logo. Not only does the logo use a font that’s distinctly not Papyrus, but the first “A” in the “Avatar” part of the logo is styled to have what appears to be a toruk as part of the letter. All of it comes together to make Avatar: The Way of Water's logo look far more creative and visually appealing than the first movie’s, which is the perfect response to the Saturday Night Live skit.
While the logo probably wasn’t made with the Saturday Night Live skit in mind, the change in style can still help with The Way of Water’s overall reception. As previously discussed, Avatar has received a lot of criticism in the years following its release from people finding its characters boring and its story derivative of other films. As such, The Way of Water faces an uphill battle in getting people invested in it, so it can’t afford to do anything that would make people think it’ll just be a retread of James Cameron's Avatar. Changing the logo doesn’t do a lot in that regard, but it does create one less thing that people can make fun of the movie for, while also giving a creative alternative to it.
Saturday Night Live got a lot of mileage out of Avatar’s use of Papyrus, but Avatar: The Way of Water’s new logo means that those kinds of jokes won’t find their way into the discussion surrounding the sequel. Of course, there may still be things for people to make fun of it for, either in a joking manner or a more serious one, but its choice in font is unlikely to be one of them. Whether or not that will mean anything in the long-run for Avatar: The Way of Water has yet to be seen, but it’s something worth noting, regardless.