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The King James Victory Parade - Avatar: The Way of Water and sequels

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I'm curious exactly how successful this project is expected to be, since while Avatar made ludicrous amounts of money based solely on how pretty it looks, the film industry isn't leaving as many open slots as were in 2009 for these sequels to fill. And being pretty isn't enough to draw the same amount of attention multiple times over.

Like, pop culture completely forgot that Avatar even existed and to be frank so did I until this thread. It's never going to be successful enough to draw in a large crowd for four successive sequels.
 
Meh. I'll probably see the sequels, but I never saw what all the fuss was about with the first to be honest.
 
>going all-in on four sequels to a movie that was made eight years ago

I utterly despised Avatar and even I completely forgot about Cameron's threatpromise that he'd keep making more. And frankly I don't see how anyone could be excited about sequels because the best characters all died in the first one. I refuse to live in a franchise where Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang are dead but Sam Worthington gets to live and frolic gaily through the meadows with Zoe Saldana. Chris Pratt is the only generic-looking brown-haired white man for her. He at least has heard of the concept of 'charisma'.
 
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I'm hoping that it turns into ever larger military hardware fighting ever larger wildlife until we get Pacific Rim in space by the fourth movie.
 
I mean, a huge part of Avatar's success was that it was a tech demo. Which means I can only assume that in addition to 3D we're getting Smell-o-vision or something with Avatar 2, otherwise what's the point?
 
Mutton said:
I mean, a huge part of Avatar's success was that it was a tech demo. Which means I can only assume that in addition to 3D we're getting Smell-o-vision or something with Avatar 2, otherwise what's the point?
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Spy-Kids 4D beat him to it. Now who's the pioneer of revolutionary cinema technology, eh Cameron? Titanic more like BOREtanic!
 
At first, I was thinking, "This generic tripe of a movie that long since faded from my mind is going to get four sequels?"

But then

trob030490 said:
The longer he stays on Avatar the more likely it is he'll never get the chance to fuck up Gunnm.

Therefore, please, keep making Avatar Cameron.
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I can totally deal with this
 
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Avatar made 2.7 billion dollars and Titanic made 2 billion. Even a new Star Wars film couldn't beat them. If you adjust for inflation even the original Star Wars can't beat Avatar.

Whatever your individual feelings about Avatar, when Hollywood looks at James Cameron they don't see a director, they see a Super Saiyan. Despite being a total eccentric who spends a lot of his time working on cameras for deep sea exploration, studios have the not unjustified belief that if this guy goes all out he will place yet another film in the highest reaches of the list of top grossing films.

You can say that Avatar's success was just the result of a lucky release year, but you know 2009 saw the release of seven films that entered the top 50 highest grossing films list. One of these was, obviously, Avatar, which entered at number 1. The runner up was Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which entered at number 8.

Obviously capturing lightning in a bottle for the third time is a bit of an ask. But setting aside The Abyss, the guy knows how to make money. Even True Lies pulled in 400 million. From the perspective of the people who make films if you're going to bank on anyone, you'd bank on James Cameron.
 
Ford Prefect said:
when Hollywood looks at James Cameron they don't see a director, they see a Super Saiyan.
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I can't explain how or why but this comparison makes sense to me and that terrifies me.

Obviously capturing lightning in a bottle for the third time is a bit of an ask.
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See, the thing that really interests me is that... well, Jimmy's had plans for another four Avatar movies since 2009, he's just taken this long toiling in the script-mines beneath the bowels of Hollywood getting them all in a row before he started filming. But the Hollywood climate is different now. Remakes, reboots and adaptations have a new big brother which is the Cinematic Universe.

There have been fourteen Marvel movies since 2008 with an extra three slated for this very year. DC have six movies planned in the 'DCU' in 2017-20 with an indeterminate amount of untitled others on the backburner, despite an overwhelming response of "please, no, stop, we're begging you" to their first three movies. Universal tried to start a Movie Monster Cinematic Universe with Dracula Untold until audiences overwhelmingly responded with "could you perhaps not" and even then they're just trying again with the Tom "Looped Scream" Cruise Mummy reboot. Transformers is going to outlive even the twisted sorcerer that birthed it with a Bumblebee spinoff, another movie and a prequel all within a year or two to Transformers 5. Disney Marvel Star Wars is going to have a new movie every year until we're all dead. Three new LEGO moves are in production as we speak. There's going to be a... c-combined... Jump Street/Men in Black cinematic universe merger what the f- a-anyway. That new King Arthur movie that hasn't even come out yet is going to get five more movies if it makes a profit. Fant4stic was meant to start its own huge franchise before audiences and critics as one said "please no". Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them was astonishingly mediocre and had a correspondingly mediocre domestic box office performance but it's still getting another four or five fucking movies. Activition want to make a fucking Call of Duty cinematic universe.

The point I'm laboriously trying to get to is that I'm wondering if Cameron hasn't overshot the sweet spot already. Cinematic universes have multiplied exponentially. Every IP and its mother has a five-film franchise. Many have been waiting for the bubble to burst since about 2010 but I think the threat's actually become fairly real by now. Is there a chance that Cameron might just show up too late to the party with his four new films about the joys of wearing leaves and eating rocks, just in time for audiences to become properly sick of bloated movie franchises? Or will this just push him to attain Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan?
 
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I think that's definitely a risk. Franchising and cinematic universes have really changed the landscape and at some point the ass has to fall out from under them. I mean if not before I half expect the Infinity War films to basically destroy the whole business. Cameron might really have the wrong timing. At the same time, part of what actually got Avatar so much currency with audiences was that they were sympathetic to the environmentalist message, and in increasingly tenuous times that might resonate again.

That said, it reminds me that the Avatar project is actually from an earlier, more innocent time where you could just make and plan sequels and not have to be part of a cinematic universe thing lol

ps just to reiterate how overpowered james cameron is he could have solved the deepwater horizon oil spill and when bp finally got their shit together they just did his proposal :V
 
Ford Prefect said:
At the same time, part of what actually got Avatar so much currency with audiences was that they were sympathetic to the environmentalist message, and in increasingly tenuous times that might resonate again.
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Really? I thought it was mostly due to being wowed by the 3D CGI tech. Though I suppose if the audience liked the magical world of Pandora so much they got depressed about having to leave it when the movie was over, that'd help them hate the RDA for wanting to exploit it for delicious, delicious oilunobtanium.

But... ugh. Avatar had such a bad environmentalist message, y'know? Bad in that special way only environmental fiction can be bad, inspiring reactive antipathy in such a large amount of the viewership. Avatar didn't preach moderation. It didn't preach reasonable goals. It preached that the Na'vi way of life was objectively superior and that the heroes had a moral duty to assimilate into it, entirely skating over the fact that the Na'vi have magic mind-link fibre optic braids and live on a hive-mind world that actively caters to their basic survival needs so they have a shitload of unfair advantages that preclude them from ever having motive to act and consume as humans do. And I worry that that kind of condescending attitude won't be so harmlessly quaint returning after six-odd years.

That said, it reminds me that the Avatar project is actually from an earlier, more innocent time where you could just make and plan sequels and not have to be part of a cinematic universe thing lol
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ps just to reiterate how overpowered james cameron is he could have solved the deepwater horizon oil spill and when bp finally got their shit together they just did his proposal :V
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He's also survived angering Ed Harris so he certainly possesses some form of witchcraft or black arts.
 
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It's been eight years since Avatar graced cinemas, and the movie business has changed hugely. I fully expect Cameron's vision to be hamstrung by the death of the tent pole summer blockbuster (sub type franchise entry with inter-linked plot) but until then, I'm down.

Avatar was a really weird film in a few ways and I want to see where Cameron goes with this whilst he still can.

Also the tears will surely flow from a certain kind of nerd, and they are delicious :V
 
ZerbanDaGreat said:
Really? I thought it was mostly due to being wowed by the 3D CGI tech. Though I suppose if the audience liked the magical world of Pandora so much they got depressed about having to leave it when the movie was over, that'd help them hate the RDA for wanting to exploit it for delicious, delicious oilunobtanium.
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In an interview Cameron noted that he wanted to focus on Avatar in part because audiences responded well to the message. While this is hardly evidentiary or anything, I remember lending my mum a PS3 so she could watch it on BD and her response was basically 'this is the kind of thing would actually happen' and she felt that it correctly depicted corporate greed and the callous disregard for the environment it engenders. She's about as normal as they come, and I've never met anyone RL who wasn't at least a little bit sympathetic. Even my coal is good Liberal true believe friend lol
 
Claudette Savagely said:
Also the tears will surely flow from a certain kind of nerd, and they are delicious :V
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I feel like, in Avatar's case at least, a large part of the problem with 'a certain kind of nerd' was... how to put this. Fuck it I'll Trope. Can't Argue With Elves. The exact inverse of Humanity Fuck Yeah, in which a nonhuman race is so unrealistically perfect and flawless that they basically exist only to mock humanity for its flaws while leaving no recourse for any kind of balanced dialogue. Any fiction involving nonhumans essentially exists on a sliding scale between "Shithead Self-Important Elves" and "Humanity Fuck Yeah" (with a fairly wide and completely non-objectionable middle ground) and the closer to one end you get the more pushback you get from parts of the audience.

I base this theory mostly on my own reaction, since that's the one I have the most experience with :V. The film went out of its way to present the Na'vi as the ideal race with absolutely no conflict or flaws, yet they were a bunch of joyless Native American stereotypes. The film went out of its way to condemn the RDA for its "fight terror with terror America bad" military actions and "hahaha having a monopoly is great, I have a solid gold toilet!" corporate actions, but Giovanni Ribisi was fun to have in a scene and Stephen Lang had enough charisma to basically blot out the screen like a miniature sun - which was welcome because Sam Worthington was a sucking black hole of it. Thus I identified much more with the RDA, and resented the Na'vi for getting handed their victory.
Ford Prefect said:
In an interview Cameron noted that he wanted to focus on Avatar in part because audiences responded well to the message. While this is hardly evidentiary or anything, I remember lending my mum a PS3 so she could watch it on BD and her response was basically 'this is the kind of thing would actually happen' and she felt that it correctly depicted corporate greed and the callous disregard for the environment it engenders. She's about as normal as they come, and I've never met anyone RL who wasn't at least a little bit sympathetic. Even my coal is good Liberal true believe friend lol
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Huh. Well there you go then.
 
ZerbanDaGreat said:
I feel like, in Avatar's case at least, a large part of the problem with 'a certain kind of nerd' was... how to put this. Fuck it I'll Trope. Can't Argue With Elves. The exact inverse of Humanity Fuck Yeah, in which a nonhuman race is so unrealistically perfect and flawless that they basically exist only to mock humanity for its flaws while leaving no recourse for any kind of balanced dialogue. Any fiction involving nonhumans essentially exists on a sliding scale between "Shithead Self-Important Elves" and "Humanity Fuck Yeah" (with a fairly wide and completely non-objectionable middle ground) and the closer to one end you get the more pushback you get from parts of the audience.

I base this theory mostly on my own reaction, since that's the one I have the most experience with :V. The film went out of its way to present the Na'vi as the ideal race with absolutely no conflict or flaws, yet they were a bunch of joyless Native American stereotypes. The film went out of its way to condemn the RDA for its "fight terror with terror America bad" military actions and "hahaha having a monopoly is great, I have a solid gold toilet!" corporate actions, but Giovanni Ribisi was fun to have in a scene and Stephen Lang had enough charisma to basically blot out the screen like a miniature sun - which was welcome because Sam Worthington was a sucking black hole of it. Thus I identified much more with the RDA, and resented the Na'vi for getting handed their victory.

Huh. Well there you go then.
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Which was the problem in the end. For all that people like to crow about how they're better than the nerds who identified with Quaritch, the fact is Stephen Lang gave a wonderful performance in a film where everyone else was, at one's most generous, phoning it in. The problem is that if you ask random people, which I have, they hardly remember anything at all about the film. It had no real impact outside of the technology; the blue space natives weren't particularly sympathetic or engaging despite their giant eyes, the plot reveals were bland, and the spectacles have been taken over by all your current crop of blockbusters.

So from a business standpoint I can see why Hollywood would be excited to back a new Cameron film. The man shits golden doubloons. But as an audience member I don't see any reason to really expect much out of another Avatar film given the failings of the first are still failings while its successes have been completely absorbed by the industry.
 
While I do think Lang turned in the film's best performance and Quaritch is written very charismatically - evil is often charismatic - I don't really think his performance is leagues better than anyone else. I particularly think that people underrate Worthington's performance because he deliberately emotes less in his human body because he feels trapped by his injury, and people just don't count facial capture, because it's not 'really' his face.
 
Claudette Savagely said:
It's been eight years since Avatar graced cinemas, and the movie business has changed hugely. I fully expect Cameron's vision to be hamstrung by the death of the tent pole summer blockbuster (sub type franchise entry with inter-linked plot) but until then, I'm down.
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Never bet against James Cameron.

He had not release a movie for nearly 12 years when Avatar came ount (since Titanic in 1998). 8 or 9 years gap is nothing.

Also, Aliens and Terminator 2 were both sequels that came 7 years after the first movie, which was much less successful compared to Avatar. Cameron never relied on quick releases to boost audience numbers.

And I so hope he doubles down on the message from the first movie, because I would love to see all the fascists cry and whine about not getting a wank fantasy about massacring people whose homeplanet you invade to steal their oil ^H^H unobtainium.
 
Ford Prefect said:
While I do think Lang turned in the film's best performance and Quaritch is written very charismatically - evil is often charismatic - I don't really think his performance is leagues better than anyone else. I particularly think that people underrate Worthington's performance because he deliberately emotes less in his human body because he feels trapped by his injury, and people just don't count facial capture, because it's not 'really' his face.
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People give Worthington shit because even when he's mocap, he doesn't emote with his voice. He doesn't sound different when he's in the Avatar body.
 
tbh the reason I'm excited is fifty percent wanting to see where James Cameron is going with the in terms of visuals, fifty percent wanting to see the salt from the HFY crowd.

Also, considering the situation our world is in right now, perhaps a heavy handed environmental message is what we need.

Ford Prefect said:
ps just to reiterate how overpowered james cameron is he could have solved the deepwater horizon oil spill and when bp finally got their shit together they just did his proposal :V
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What, really!?
 
tankdrop24 said:
What, really!?
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Yeah, so like, filming the Abyss and Titanic turned him into a no shit expert on deep sea exploration, and like he met with the EPA over it, and reportedly got so frustrated at how BP were faffing about over it, called them up and said, look, I'll fix this for you. They declined, but their final solution was supposedly similar to the techniques he floated with the EPA.
 
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