I seriously can’t remember enough of the Avatar story to know what is going on. I know I’ve seen both films but I can’t for the life of me recall anything significant about them.
All I get from my brain when I think of Avatar is the “Blue Rabbits Fucking” sketch from Robot Chicken.
Too bad it’s from Disney, I will not support fascism enablers.
The high seas don’t pay fascists
Yar
Not my avatar. I want Aang.
Erm… Aang Lee did make something… No, we won’t speak of it.
Is that good or bad.
The second and third paragraphs outline it in terms of box office, but it’s basically good. The Christmas holiday season is also different when looking at films and their opening weekend. People are more likely to wait and see a film at/around Christmas proper, aka this upcoming week. The lower review scores might cause a slightly lower turnout, but most people know what to expect and probably aren’t dissuaded.
Will Avatar 3 break box office records? Probably not. Will it make enough money that James Cameron will get to make Avatar 4 & 5? Likely.
I was under the impression that he had enough money to self finance Avatar 4 + 5 if need be and was not going to be dissuaded from making them one way or the other
Publicly Cameron has been saying he is going to wait and see how 3 does before he announces 4 and 5. He likely has the money to self finance them, although they are expensive films, like some of the most expensive films, so it’s really probably Disney or whomever who is waiting.
I think if it bombed completely, he might have paused and made some changes to the upcoming films before moving forward.
But in the long run 4 and 5 are probably getting made regardless.
That’s a fair take on things. Thanks for the insight. I figure anyone who can build a submarine company and an ocean explorer vessel and some hologram data visualization system and whatever else sort of shenanigans he is up to, has a very different set of concerns around money than most of us do
Turns out I was wrong, Lightstorm Entertainment is who produces the film and owns the Avatar production technology, and that company is owned by James Cameron.
It’s Fox who does the distribution, and Fox’s parent company is of course Disney.
So Cameron is just waiting for it to be an actual success before announcing the sequels (although they seem to already have release dates.)
Avatar 2 & 3 shot together (or back to back) and that’s the same plan for Avatar 4 & 5, so waiting a few weeks isn’t really a big deal. Plus various planning is already underway, so it’ll really just be an “announcement” that everyone expects.
I have had that same exact question after the first two avatar movies.
This site says it needs about 1.1b to break even and yet Avatar 2 cleared 2.3b? How TF it did that idk
The Avatar movies are a bizarre phenomenon. Absolutely nobody ever talks about them. They have almost zero cultural presence, and yet they are incredibly successful, despite the staggering cost of making them.
I’ve always thought it was bizarre too. Nobody in my social group has watched it. We all know of it, obviously there was huge media coverage, we know sort of what it’s about. I assume I’m just an outlier in a group of outliers, but it’s still so strange. Did millions of bots go to theaters and watch it? Somebody must’ve watched it, or watched it multiple times. People obviously still watched this new installment. I just have no idea who. You’d think some of these people would have to be passionate about it, but… you never see or hear them. There are no people dressing up and going to AvatarCon, or even going to ComicCon AS Avatar characters. It’s like it’s a secret society, first rule of avatar club is nobody talks about avatar club. I don’t get it.
The Avatar movies are mostly a tech demo. They’re impressive when you look at the CGI, all the special effects, the audio, the 3D, the scenes…
The story isn’t bad, it’s just average. Competently made, but predictable. However, it makes sense when you realize the story is just the excuse to make everything else. There has to be one, but it really doesn’t need to be complex as long as it gets to show what Cameron wants to show.
I think most people watch the movies to see the tech demo, and that’s why, despite being some of the highest grossing movies, they don’t have that big of a cultural impact.
I have watched the first one, and at the end of the day it is an extremely competently made movie. That’s something that can’t be ignored. The plot is cliche as hell, and it’s basically doing all the worst parts of the Dances with Wolves white saviour bullshit, but at the end of the day James Cameron is an absolutely phenomenal director, especially when it comes to action, and that does a lot of work for it.
It’s the kind of movie where the things that bother you tend to bother you later, because you do get caught up in the spectacle of it all. Cameron does spectacle very well, and there’s an art to that.
The first one generated tremendous buzz. And while I don’t generally go to see 3D movies, the 3D in avatar movies is exceptional and worth seeing in theaters.
The second one wasn’t nearly the same buzz, so I agree there. But the 3D was still amazing.
I think it generated tremendous buzz, and then disappeared without a trace. Like, it’s genuinely shocking how quickly people forgot about it given how big the hype for it was.
It actually makes sense if you think about it.
Titanic was Cameron’s previous record breaker, and still has more cultural impact than Avatar. Why? Because it’s also one of the best selling home media films of all time. People watched it in theaters, then took it home and watched it again. They watched it when it aired on tv.
Even before home media, movies like Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz were released in theaters multiple times, and then later were sold on home media and aired on tv. Home media films are the ones generations grow up with and continue to talk about.
Avatar movies are purely theatrical films. How many people are rewatching them dozens of times on streaming? Likely very few. So the buzz only shows up when one enters theaters, and once the theater run is done the buzz dies down.
And between films, people only really talk in meta-commentary: the box office, whether the films are overrated, whether they have cultural impact, etc. No one is comparing Jake Sully to Captain Kirk or Luke Skywalker, no one is shipping characters, no one’s commenting on the plot at all, they only talk about the films as films.
The movie or the box office?
