They Said ‘Avatar’ Has No Cultural Impact, But Now Lizzo Is Doing Na’vi Thirst Traps And We Don’t Know What To Believe

The original 2009 Avatar movie and the new Avatar: The Way Of Water film are both major hits. Box office numbers don’t lie. Regardless, there have been questions about what cultural impact the series (the first movie, more specifically) has actually had. Of course, this discourse is all subjective, but if Avatar didn’t have impact, then why is Lizzo on the beach doing Na’vi thirst traps?

In a TikTok video shared today (January 9), the right half of the frame shows a female Na’vi walking on the beach. On the left is Lizzo, doing a spot-on imitation of the character in a clip that was Avatar-ized with a video filter. She later shared another video of herself with the filter, enjoying some time in the water. “tell James Cameron I’m ready…,” she captioned the second video.

Hey, James Cameron: Lizzo is ready.

Speaking of Cameron, he addressed the “cultural impact” conversation in a recent interview, saying, “There’s skepticism in the marketplace around, ‘Oh, did it ever make any real cultural impact? Can anybody even remember the characters’ names?’ When you have extraordinary success, you come back within the next three years. That’s just how the industry works. You come back to the well, and you build that cultural impact over time. Marvel had maybe 26 movies to build out a universe, with the characters cross-pollinating. So it’s an irrelevant argument. We’ll see what happens after this film.”

Lizzo is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.