This study examines how immersive narrative resources, whether technological–sensory, narrative–structural, or contextual, are deployed in contemporary blockbuster cinema and to what extent audiences recognize and value them in their evaluations. Using Avatar: Fire and Ash as a case study, the research follows a sequential mixed-methods design. In the first phase, a qualitative film analysis identifies eight types of cognitive immersion, drawing on established theoretical frameworks of narrative immersion. The second phase is quantitative and involves the computational analysis of 1133 valid reviews from Internet Movie Database (IMDb) through Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, including n-gram frequency analysis, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling with 3 topics after perplexity minimization, and sentiment polarity analysis. The LDA model reveals three discursive clusters, experiential and emotional, technical and comparative, and critical, with the latter concentrated mostly in low-rated reviews. Text sentiment and numeric ratings show a moderate positive correlation (r = 0.53, p < 0.001), pointing to a general but imperfect alignment between the two modes of evaluation. Markers of content fatigue (nothing new, predictable, boring) appear in 25.1% of the reviews, yet a third of those are still rated 8 or higher. When cross-tabulating the immersion categories with audience language, phenomenological and affective dimensions such as Emotional Engagement (59.8%) and Haptic/Sensory Experience (59.1%) emerge as the most frequently discussed, while cinematographic techniques like Bracketing (2.6%) are barely mentioned. Taken together, the findings suggest that the franchise sustains its appeal through a form of embodied sensory engagement that operates largely independent of narrative novelty.
Sosa-Fernández et al. (2026) studied this question.