Man dies watching Avatar: The Way Of Water in cinema

A man has died during a screening of Avatar: The Way of Water in India as a result of a heart attack that might have been triggered by the exciting scenes in the film.

Lakshmireddy Srinu attended the screening with his younger brother in a theatre in the Kakinada district in southern Andhra Pradesh. Reports say that the man suddenly collapsed in the middle of the three-hour film and emergency services were called with haste. Sadly, Srinu was declared dead at the Peddapuram Government Hospital.

Avatar: The Way of Water offers the most technologically impressive scenes I've ever seen in a film, and it has even caused crashes in theatres that weren't equipped to process its high frame-rate 3D format. Those amazing underwater moments too were thanks to new cameras that could cope in the water and collect separate shots from above and below water and merge them into one coherent image with the assistance of new artificial intelligence working with the motion-captured actors.

It is possible therefore that the excitement over seeing Avatar: The Way of Water incited the heart attack that Srinu suffered though there would have already been factors predisposing him to this condition. "People with underlying heart problems can die suddenly due to extreme stress/excitement. This may be due to a plaque rupture in the coronaries or triggering of an arrhythmia due to the excitement. These kinds of deaths do happen during exciting matches/emotional situations. The movie per se is unlikely to have caused death," explained Dr Pradeep Kumar, senior consultant of interventional cardiology at the Aster CMI Hospital, to the Hindustan Times.