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Inside James Cameron’s Billion-Dollar Bet on ‘Avatar’ - Hollywood Reporter

Inside James Cameron’s Billion-Dollar Bet on ‘Avatar’ - Hollywood Reporter

Inside James Cameron’s Billion-Dollar Bet on ‘Avatar’ - Hollywood Reporter
Nov 30, 2022 7 mins, 57 secs

Cameron says he took the kids’ note, that he tries to listen more and control less.

In Avatar: The Way of Water, which Disney will release Dec.

The Way of Water is Cameron’s first film in 13 years, since the original Avatar became the highest-grossing movie of all time ($2.92 billion worldwide), collected nine Oscar nominations, including best picture and best director, and introduced groundbreaking new filmmaking techniques.

The sequel cost more than $350 million, and it’s scheduled to kick off a wave of three more Avatar movies, which, if completed, will represent a more than $1 billion investment for Disney on production costs alone.

Cameron is shuttling between the mixing theaters where the crew is tweaking the sound on the last four of 15 reels — Avatar: The Way of Water will run just over three hours — and a dark nearby visual effects office that he ducks into to oversee the last 60 or so of the movie’s jaw-dropping 3,350 visual effects shots.

At 68, the director looks pretty much like he did on the first Avatar movie.

Cameron has already shot Avatar 3, due in 2024, and part of 4 (2026), and he has a script for 5 (2028).

And that opportunity will simply be market-driven, if people want it, if they like this movie enough.”.

Amid the studio’s massive financial outlay and his own commitment of years in the prime of his career, Cameron is aware that the Avatar franchise has its doubters.

” ‘Can anybody even remember the characters’ names?'” If people are less likely to remember Jake Sully than, say, Luke Skywalker, that’s partly because Avatar is only one movie into its mythology, Cameron says.

That’s a silly target.” At the time, Cameron was more interested in pursuing his other passions, including ocean exploration and environmental sustainability.

“I started confronting this issue of, ‘Do I even want to make another movie, let alone another Avatar movie?'” Cameron says.

Maybe it’s not entertainment anymore.” Avatar: The Way of Water, Cameron says, is not intended to make people fear climate change but to suggest, by way of choices made by the film’s Na’vi characters, some alternate paths forward.

“This looks like a 1960s dinosaur movie explosion.” Cameron is huddled in a small, dark office next to his own, reviewing a sequence of a helicopter crash with his visual effects supervisor, Eric Saindon, and a group of Weta FX artists participating by Zoom.

Cameron flies helicopters himself and puts them in most of his movies — he had a stunt pilot fly one under a freeway overpass in Terminator 2, dangled Jamie Lee Curtis out of one in True Lies and designed a futuristic helicopter that could actually fly for the first Avatar.

Weaver’s character, scientist Grace Augustine, died in the first Avatar, but “the idea for Kiri came from, well, is Grace really dead?” Cameron says.

After the first Avatar, Cameron and his producer Jon Landau determined that Cameron was too much of a bottleneck because every virtual camera shot went through his hands.

On The Way of Water, Cameron estimates that he shot 70 percent of the virtual camerawork, and Richard Baneham, an Irish visual effects supervisor who worked on the first Avatar, shot the other 30 percent.

Of the 10 highest-grossing movies of all time, only two of them — Avatar and Titanic — were not based on preexisting intellectual properties like comic books, novels or prior films.

With the studio’s appetite for more Avatar, Cameron felt he had an opportunity to go bigger, in a storytelling sense, than he ever had.

In the fall of 2010, Cameron committed to make what was then going to be two more Avatar movies, with the unusual deal provision that Fox would co-fund, with Cameron, a nonprofit, the Avatar Foundation, to support Indigenous rights and the environment.

After he returned from the Mariana Trench in 2012, Cameron started to think seriously about the movies, spending the first several months just jotting down notes — ideas for creatures, cultures, themes.

Cameron finally started production on Avatar 2 in September 2017.

In some ways, Disney was an ideal home — the studio had already spent $500 million on a Pandora attraction at its theme park in Florida, and so was invested in Avatar succeeding.

And Cameron and Disney had been flirting for years: Back in 2005, when Fox was wavering over whether to greenlight the first Avatar, Cameron and Landau had invited then-CEO Bob Iger, studio chief Dick Cook and CFO Alan Bergman to their soundstage in Playa Vista to watch some test footage.

It was so unique.” Disney started negotiations to make Avatar, which sparked Fox to convince its financial partners to raise their investments in the film, and ultimately Cameron stayed at the studio he had been in the trenches with for decades, on Titanic, True Lies and Aliens.

In March 2019, when the Disney/Fox deal closed, one of the first things Bergman says he did was meet with Cameron and Landau.

On Titanic and the first Avatar, Cameron clashed with Fox execs over budgets and the films’ potential to earn them back.

If the movie doesn’t make money, then, maybe, the honeymoon’s over.” He cites his transparency, telling the studio early on if he feels something may shift in the schedule, and says he respects Disney’s marketing prowess.

Landau, who as a young Fox executive first met Cameron while working on True Lies, has been his producer and right hand since Titanic.

“I’ve seen an evolution of him,” Landau says of Cameron.

He looks back and goes, ‘This is what worked, this is what didn’t work, how do I make it better?'” As Landau is in the middle of this sentence, there’s a hard knock on his office door and Cameron pops in, Kramer-style.

“Did he tell you we’re like an old married couple?” Cameron says.

“I don’t want to say nice things in front of him — it’ll go to his head — but I feel like there’s no problem we can’t solve.”.

For one thing, the shooting schedule on the Avatar films is so unusually long that crewmembers talk about their “Avatar-versaries.” The human characters in the movie, like Champion’s and a marine biologist played by New Zealand actor Jemaine Clement, are shot in live-action.

The actors playing Na’vi characters, like Worthington and Weaver, are shot in performance-capture, on stages where cameras track their movements and, later, visual effects artists modify their appearance.

This is how the character of Kiri manages to look recognizably like Weaver and like a teenage alien at the same time.

Cameron had finished the 16-month performance-capture portion of the second, third and part of the fourth Avatar films and had shot some of the live-action portions when the COVID-19 pandemic arrived.

By May, the government agreed, and Cameron, Landau and 31 other crewmembers were allowed to enter the country together on a single plane.

Might not be at the scale of an Avatar movie, but, I mean, they’re doing some pretty big stuff for streaming.'”

We’re going to play the epic game.” Asked how audiences should time a bathroom break, Cameron says, “Any time they want

He typically doesn’t have a massive opening weekend, à la Marvel movies, but instead holds or builds his audience over time

“Ironically, it’s less in-demand and more available,” he says, noting that, at the time Avatar was released, there were some 6,000 3D-enabled digital projectors worldwide; now there are roughly 110,000

Cameron attributes the drop in demand to screens that weren’t bright enough and to the poor quality of films that studios began releasing after Avatar — 2D films quickly converted to 3D in a bid for a cash grab rather than something originally created in 3D, like Avatar

There are signs audiences will still pay for 3D tickets for certain films — when Disney rereleased Avatar in September, it earned an impressive $76 million at the global box office, more than 97 percent of that from 3D

One of the surprises of the rerelease for Cameron was to learn that teens and 20-somethings, who hadn’t been old enough to see Avatar in theaters the first time around, were the audience most enthusiastic to see the movie

He’s also got plans — should the world demand them — for Avatar 6 and 7

That sounds like a joke, but based on the fact that it took 25 years for him to make the first two Avatar movies, it’s pretty realistic

“Obviously, I’m not going to be able to make Avatar movies indefinitely, the amount of energy required.” He’s started giving some thought to a succession plan

“I would have to train somebody how to do this because, I don’t care how smart you are as a director, you don’t know how to do this.” He figures he may have five or six more movies in him and that three of them, probably, would be Avatar movies

He certainly seems to have enough Avatar story in his head to live in that world indefinitely — he wrote an entire script of what takes place between minute four of Avatar: The Way of Water and minute five, in which a year passes and a great deal of backstory for Champion’s character, Spider, unfolds

Cameron peeled that story off and had it turned into a graphic novel, Avatar: The High Ground, penned by YA literature writer Sherri L

And then there’s all of that life beyond the movies that Cameron is so interested in

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