Development on Avatar began in 1994, when Cameron wrote an 80-page scriptment for the film. Filming was supposed to take place after the completion of Cameron's 1997 film Titanic, for a planned release in 1999, but according to Cameron, the necessary technology was not yet available to achieve his vision of the film. Work on the language for the film's extraterrestrial beings began in Summer 2005, and Cameron began developing the screenplay and fictional universe in early 2006. Avatar was officially budgeted at $237 million. Other estimates put the cost between $280 million and $310 million for production and at $150 million for promotion. The film was released for traditional viewing, 3-D viewing (using the RealD 3D, Dolby 3D, XpanD 3D, and IMAX 3D formats), and "4-D" viewing. The stereoscopic filmmaking was touted as a breakthrough in cinematic technology.
Avatar premiered in London on December 10, 2009, and was internationally released on December 16 and in the United States and Canada on December 18, to critical acclaim and commercial success. The film broke several box office records during its release and became the highest-grossing film of all time in the U.S. and Canada and also worldwide, surpassing Titanic, which had held the records for the previous twelve years. It also became the first film to gross more than $2 billion. Avatar was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won three, for Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects, and Best Art Direction. The film's home release went on to break opening sales records and became the top-selling Blu-ray of all time. Following the film's success, Cameron signed with 20th Century Fox to produce two sequels, making Avatar the first of a planned trilogy.
Plot
In 2154, the RDA Corporation is mining a valuable mineral called unobtanium on Pandora, a lush, Earth-like habitable moon with an atmosphere poisonous to humans in the Alpha Centauri star system. Pandora is inhabited by the Na'vi, 10-foot (3.0 m)-tall, blue-skinned, sapient humanoids who live in harmony with nature and worship a mother goddess called Eywa.
To learn about the Na'vi and Pandora's biosphere, scientists use Na'vi-human hybrid bodies called avatars that are operated via mental link by genetically matched humans. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic former marine, replaces his twin brother, a scientist trained as an avatar operator who was murdered in a robbery. Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), head of the Avatar Program, considers Sully an inadequate replacement and assigns him as a bodyguard. While protecting the avatars of Grace and scientist Norm Spellman (Joel David Moore) on their expedition to collect biological samples and data in the forest, Jake's avatar is attacked by a jungle predator thanator. Fleeing for his life, Jake strays from the rest of the group and gets lost in the forest. Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), a female Na'vi, stumbles upon Jake and reluctantly rescues him from Pandora's wildlife. Seeing portents from Eywa, she takes him to her clan's dwelling, Hometree; there, Jake meets Neytiri's father, clan chief Eytukan (Wes Studi). Neytiri's mother Mo'at (C. C. H. Pounder), the clan's spiritual leader, orders her daughter to teach the "warrior dreamwalker" their ways.
The head of Sec-Ops, the RDA's private security force, Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), promises Jake that the company will help him walk again if he gathers intelligence about the Na'vi. Hometree is on top of the richest deposits of unobtanium for hundreds of miles. When Grace learns that Jake is passing information to Quaritch, she relocates herself, Jake, and Norm to a remote outpost. Over three months, Jake grows close to Neytiri and her people. After Jake is initiated into the tribe, he and Neytiri choose each other as mates. Jake reveals his change of allegiance when he attempts to disable a bulldozer that threatens to destroy a sacred Na'vi site. When Quaritch shows a videofootage of Jake's attack on the bulldozer to Administrator Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi), the leader of the RDA colony, along with one of Jake's video diary entries, in which Jake admits that the Na'vi will never abandon Hometree, Selfridge orders Hometree destroyed.
Despite Grace's argument that destroying Hometree could affect the bio-botanical neural network to which Pandoran organisms are connected, Selfridge gives Jake and Grace one hour to convince the Na'vi to evacuate. When Jake reveals his original mission, Neytiri accuses him of betraying the entire tribe, and Jake and Grace's avatars are taken captive. Quaritch's forces destroy Hometree, killing Neytiri's father, as well as many others. Mo'at frees Jake and Grace, but they are unplugged from their avatars back at RDA headquarters and imprisoned. Trudy Chacón (Michelle Rodriguez), a pilot disgusted with Quaritch's brutal methods, breaks them out and flies them to the avatar link outpost. During the escape, Quaritch shoots and seriously wounds Grace.
The Na'vi are able to link mentally with some animals. To regain the Na'vi's trust, Jake takes a dangerous gamble and links with a Toruk, a powerful pterodactyl-like predator that has been tamed only five times in Na'vi history. Jake finds the refugees at the sacred Tree of Souls and pleads with Mo'at to heal Grace. The clan attempts to transfer Grace from her human body into her avatar with the aid of the Tree, but she succumbs to her injuries before the process can be completed.
Supported by the new Omaticaya chief, Tsu'tey (Laz Alonso), who acts as Jake's translator, Jake gives an inspiring speech to rally the Omaticaya clan and tells them to gather more Na'vi warriors in preparation for battle against the RDA. On the eve of battle, Jake prays to Eywa, via a neural connection to the Tree of Souls, to intercede on behalf of the Na'vi, although Neytiri warns him that Eywa does not take sides. Quaritch detects the mobilization of the Na'vi and convinces Selfridge to authorize a preemptive strike against the Tree of Souls, believing that its destruction will demoralize the natives.
Cast
Sam Worthington as Corporal Jake Sully. Sully is a disabled former Marine. He becomes part of the Avatar Program after his twin brother is killed. His military background helps the Na'vi warriors relate to him. Cameron cast the Australian actor after a worldwide search for promising young actors, preferring relative unknowns to keep the budget down. Worthington, who was living in his car at the time, auditioned twice early in development, and he has signed on for possible sequels. Cameron felt that because Worthington had not done a major film, he would give the character "a quality that is really real". Cameron said he "has that quality of being a guy you'd want to have a beer with, and he ultimately becomes a leader who transforms the world".
Stephen Lang as Colonel Miles Quaritch. Quaritch is the head of the mining operation's security detail. Fiercely loyal to his military code, he has a profound disregard for Pandora's inhabitants that is evident in both his actions and his language. Lang had unsuccessfully auditioned for a role in Cameron's Aliens (1986), but the director remembered Lang and sought him for Avatar. Michael Biehn, who was in Aliens, read the script and watched some of the 3-D footage with Cameron, but was ultimately not cast in the role.
Sigourney Weaver as Dr. Grace Augustine. Augustine is an exobiologist and head of the Avatar Program. She mentors Sully and is an advocate of peaceful relations with the Na'vi, having set up a school to teach them English.
Michelle Rodriguez as Trudy Chacón. Chacón is a combat pilot assigned to support the Avatar Program who is sympathetic to the Na'vi. Cameron had wanted to work with Rodriguez since seeing her in Girlfight.
Giovanni Ribisi as Parker Selfridge. Selfridge is the corporate administrator for the RDA mining operation. While he is at first willing to destroy Na'avi civilization to preserve the company's bottom line, he is reluctant to authorize the attacks on the Na'vi, doing so only after Quaritch persuades him that it is necessary, and the attacks will be humane. When the attacks are broadcast to the base, Selfridge displays discomfort at the violence.
Joel David Moore as Dr. Norm Spellman. Spellman is a xenoanthropologist who studies plant and animal life as part of the Avatar Program. He arrives on Pandora at the same time as Sully and operates an avatar. Although he is expected to lead the diplomatic contact with the Na'vi, it turns out that Jake has the personality better suited to win the natives' respect.
Dileep Rao as Dr. Max Patel, a scientist who works in the Avatar Program and comes to support Jake's rebellion against the RDA.
Na'vi
Production
Origins
In 1994, director James Cameron wrote an 80-page scriptment for Avatar. In August 1996, he announced that after completing Titanic, he would film Avatar, which would make use of synthetic, or computer-generated, actors. The project would cost $100 million and involve at least six actors in leading roles "who appear to be real but do not exist in the physical world". Visual effects house Digital Domain, with whom Cameron has a partnership, joined the project, which was supposed to begin production in the summer of 1997 for a 1999 release. However, Cameron felt that the technology had not caught up with the story and vision that he intended to tell. He decided to concentrate on making documentaries and refining the technology for the next few years. It was revealed in a Bloomberg BusinessWeek cover story that 20th Century Fox had fronted $10 million to Cameron to film a proof-of-concept clip for Avatar, which he showed to Fox execs in October 2005.
In February 2006, Cameron revealed that his film Project 880 was "a retooled version of Avatar", a film that he had tried to make years earlier, citing the technological advances in the creation of the computer-generated characters Gollum, King Kong, and Davy Jones. Cameron had chosen Avatar over his project Battle Angel after completing a five-day camera test in the previous year.
Development
Wikinews has related news: Elvish, Klingon and Na'vi: Constructed languages gain foothold in film
From January to April 2006, Cameron worked on the script and developed a culture for the film's aliens, the Na'vi. Their language was created by Dr. Paul Frommer, a linguist at USC. The Na'vi language has a vocabulary of about 1000 words, with some 30 added by Cameron. The tongue's phonemes include ejective consonants (such as the "kx" in "skxawng") that are found in the Amharic language of Ethiopia, and the initial "ng" that Cameron may have taken from New Zealand Māori. Actress Sigourney Weaver and the film's set designers met with Jodie S. Holt, professor of plant physiology at University of California, Riverside, to learn about the methods used by botanists to study and sample plants, and to discuss ways to explain the communication between Pandora's organisms depicted in the film.
Wikinews has related news: James Cameron to use Weta Digital for next film
From 2005 to 2007, Cameron worked with a handful of designers, including famed fantasy illustrator Wayne Barlowe and renowned concept artist Jordu Schell, to shape the design of the Na'vi with paintings and physical sculptures when Cameron felt that 3-D brush renderings were not capturing his vision, often working together in the kitchen of Cameron's Malibu home. In July 2006, Cameron announced that he would film Avatar for a mid 2008 release and planned to begin principal photography with an established cast by February 2007. The following August, the visual effects studio Weta Digital signed on to help Cameron produce Avatar. Stan Winston, who had collaborated with Cameron in the past, joined Avatar to help with the film's designs. Production design for the film took several years. The film had two different production designers, and two separate art departments, one of which focused on the flora and fauna of Pandora, and another that created human machines and human factors. In September 2006, Cameron was announced to be using his own Reality Camera System to film in 3-D. The system would use two high-definition cameras in a single camera body to create depth perception.
Fox was wavering because of its painful experience with cost overruns and delays on Cameron's previous picture, Titanic, even though Cameron rewrote Avatar's script to combine several characters together and offered to cut his fee in case the film flopped. Cameron installed a traffic light with the amber signal lit outside of co-producer Jon Landau's office to represent the film's uncertain future.
External audio
In December 2006, Cameron described Avatar as "a futuristic tale set on a planet 200 years hence ... an old-fashioned jungle adventure with an environmental conscience that aspires to a mythic level of storytelling". The January 2007 press release described the film as "an emotional journey of redemption and revolution" and said the story is of "a wounded former Marine, thrust unwillingly into an effort to settle and exploit an exotic planet rich in biodiversity, who eventually crosses over to lead the indigenous race in a battle for survival". The story would be of an entire world complete with an ecosystem of phantasmagorical plants and creatures, and a native people with a rich culture and language.
Estimates put the cost of the film at about $280–310 million to produce and an estimated $150 million for marketing, noting that about $30 million in tax credits will lessen the financial impact on the studio and its financiers. A studio spokesperson, said that the budget "is $237 million, with $150 million for promotion, end of story".
Themes and inspirations
Avatar is primarily an action-adventure journey of self-discovery, in the context of imperialism and deep ecology. Cameron said his inspiration was "every single science fiction book I read as a kid", and that he was particularly striving to update the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter series. The director has acknowledged that Avatar shares themes with the films At Play in the Fields of the Lord, The Emerald Forest, and Princess Mononoke, which feature clashes between cultures and civilizations, and with Dances With Wolves, where a battered soldier finds himself drawn to the culture he was initially fighting against.
In a 2007 interview with Time magazine, Cameron was asked about the meaning of the term Avatar, to which he replied, "It's an incarnation of one of the Hindu gods taking a flesh form. In this film what that means is that the human technology in the future is capable of injecting a human's intelligence into a remotely located body, a biological body."
The look of the Na'vi—the humanoids indigenous to Pandora—was inspired by a dream that Cameron's mother had, long before he started work on Avatar. In her dream, she saw a blue-skinned woman 12 feet (4 m) tall, which he thought was "kind of a cool image". Also he said, "I just like blue. It's a good color ... plus, there's a connection to the Hindu deities, which I like conceptually." He included similar creatures in his first screenplay (written in 1976 or 1977), which featured a planet with a native population of "gorgeous" tall blue aliens. The Na'vi were based on them.
For the love story between characters Jake and Neytiri, Cameron applied a star-crossed love theme, and acknowledged its similarity to the pairing of Jack and Rose from his film Titanic. Both couples come from radically different cultures that are contemptuous of their relationship and are forced to choose sides between the competing communities.
For the film's floating "Hallelujah Mountains", the designers drew inspiration from "many different types of mountains, but mainly the karst limestone formations in China." According to production designer Dylan Cole, the fictional floating rocks were inspired by Mount Huang (also known as Huangshan), Guilin, Zhangjiajie, among others around the world. Director Cameron had noted the influence of the Chinese peaks on the design of the floating mountains.
Filming
Principal photography for Avatar began in April 2007 in Los Angeles and Wellington, New Zealand. Cameron described the film as a hybrid with a full live-action shoot in combination with computer-generated characters and live environments. "Ideally at the end of the day the audience has no idea which they're looking at," Cameron said. The director indicated that he had already worked four months on nonprincipal scenes for the film. The live action was shot with a modified version of the proprietary digital 3-D Fusion Camera System, developed by Cameron and Vince Pace. In January 2007, Fox had announced that 3-D filming for Avatar would be done at 24 frames per second despite Cameron's strong opinion that a 3-D film requires higher frame rate to make strobing less noticeable. According to Cameron, the film is composed of 60% computer-generated elements and 40% live action, as well as traditional miniatures.
Motion-capture photography lasted 31 days at the Hughes Aircraft stage in Playa Vista in Los Angeles. Live action photography began in October 2007 at Stone Street Studios in Wellington, New Zealand, and was scheduled to last 31 days. More than a thousand people worked on the production. In preparation of the filming sequences, all of the actors underwent professional training specific to their characters such as archery, horseback riding, firearm use, and hand-to-hand combat. They received language and dialect training in the Na'vi language created for the film. Prior to shooting the film, Cameron also sent the cast to the Hawaiian tropical rainforests to get a feel for a rainforest setting before shooting on the soundstage.
During filming, Cameron made use of his virtual camera system, a new way of directing motion-capture filmmaking. The system is showing the actors' virtual counterparts in their digital surroundings in real time, allowing the director to adjust and direct scenes just as if shooting live action. According to Cameron, "It's like a big, powerful game engine. If I want to fly through space, or change my perspective, I can. I can turn the whole scene into a living miniature and go through it on a 50 to 1 scale." Using conventional techniques, the complete virtual world cannot be seen until the motion-capture of the actors is complete. Cameron said this process does not diminish the value or importance of acting. On the contrary, because there is no need for repeated camera and lighting setups, costume fittings and make-up touch-ups, scenes do not need to be interrupted repeatedly. Cameron described the system as a "form of pure creation where if you want to move a tree or a mountain or the sky or change the time of day, you have complete control over the elements".
Visual effects
A number of innovative visual effects techniques were used in the production of Avatar. According to Cameron, work on the film had been delayed since the 1990s to allow the techniques to reach the necessary degree of advancement to adequately portray his vision of the film. The director planned to make use of photorealistic computer-generated characters, created using new motion-capture animation technologies he had been developing in the 14 months leading up to December 2006.
Innovations include a new system for lighting massive areas like Pandora's jungle, a motion-capture stage or "volume" six times larger than any previously used, and an improved method of capturing facial expressions, enabling full performance capture. To achieve the face capturing, actors wore individually made skull caps fitted with a tiny camera positioned in front of the actors' faces; the information collected about their facial expressions and eyes is then transmitted to computers. According to Cameron, the method allows the filmmakers to transfer 100% of the actors' physical performances to their digital counterparts. Besides the performance capture data which were transferred directly to the computers, numerous reference cameras gave the digital artists multiple angles of each performance. A technically challenging scene was near the end of the film when the computer-generated Neytiri held the live action Jake in human form, and attention was given to the details of the shadows and reflected light between them.
The lead visual effects company was Weta Digital in Wellington, New Zealand, at one point employing 900 people to work on the film. Because of the huge amount of data which needed to be stored, cataloged and available for everybody involved, even on the other side of the world, a new cloud computing and Digital Asset Management (DAM) system named Gaia was created by Microsoft especially for Avatar, which allowed the crews to keep track of and coordinate all stages in the digital processing. To render Avatar, Weta used a 10,000 sq ft (930 m2) server farm making use of 4,000 Hewlett-Packard servers with 35,000 processor cores running Ubuntu Linux and the Grid Engine cluster manager. The render farm occupies the 193rd to 197th spots in the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. A new texturing and paint software system called Mari, was developed by The Foundry in cooperation with Weta. Creating the Na'vi characters and the virtual world of Pandora required over a petabyte of digital storage, and each minute of the final footage for Avatar occupies 17.28 gigabytes of storage.
Music and soundtrack
Composer James Horner scored the film, his third collaboration with Cameron after Aliens and Titanic. Horner recorded parts of the score with a small chorus singing in the alien language Na'vi in March 2008. He also worked with Wanda Bryant, an ethnomusicologist, to create a music culture for the alien race. The first scoring sessions were planned to take place in spring 2009. During production, Horner promised Cameron that he would not work on any other project except for Avatar and reportedly worked on the score from four in the morning till ten at night throughout the process. He stated in an interview, "Avatar has been the most difficult film I have worked on and the biggest job I have undertaken. Horner composed the score as two different scores merged into one.
Marketing
Promotions
Cameron at the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con promoting the film
The first photo of the film was released on August 14, 2009, and Empire magazine released exclusive images from the film in its October issue. Cameron, producer Jon Landau, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, and Sigourney Weaver appeared at a panel, moderated by Tom Rothman, at the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con on July 23. Twenty-five minutes of footage was screened in Dolby 3D. Weaver and Cameron appeared at additional panels to promote the film, speaking on the 23rd and 24th respectively. James Cameron announced at the Comic-Con Avatar Panel that August 21 will be 'Avatar Day'. On this day the trailer for the film was released in all theatrical formats. The official game trailer and toy line of the film were also unveiled on this day.
The 129-second trailer was released online on August 20, 2009. The new 210-second trailer was premiered in theatres on October 23, 2009, then soon after premiered online on Yahoo! on October 29, 2009, to positive reviews. An extended version in IMAX 3D received overwhelmingly positive reviews. The Hollywood Reporter said that audience expectations were coloured by "the same establishment skepticism that preceded Titanic" and suggested the showing reflected the desire for original storytelling. The teaser has been among the most viewed trailers in the history of film marketing, reaching the first place of all trailers viewed on Apple.com with 4 million views. On October 30, to celebrate the opening of the first 3-D cinema in Vietnam, Fox allowed Megastar Cinema to screen exclusive 16 minutes of Avatar to a number of press. The three-and-a-half-minute trailer of the film premiered live on November 1, 2009, during a Dallas Cowboys football game at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, on the Diamond Vision screen, one of the world's largest video displays, and to TV audiences viewing the game on Fox. It is said to be the largest live motion picture trailer viewing in history.
The Coca-Cola Company collaborated with Twentieth Century Fox to launch a worldwide marketing campaign to promote the film. The highlight of the campaign was the website AVTR.com. Specially marked bottles and cans of Coca-Cola Zero, when held in front of a webcam, enabled users to interact with the website's 3-D features using augmented reality (AR) technology.
Books
Avatar: A Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora, a 224-page book in the form of a field guide to the film's fictional setting of the planet of Pandora, was released by Harper Entertainment on November 24, 2009. It is presented as a compilation of data collected by the humans about Pandora and the life on it, written by Maria Wilhelm and Dirk Mathison. HarperFestival also released Wilhelm's 48-page James Cameron's Avatar: The Reusable Scrapbook for children. The Art of Avatar: James Cameron's Epic Adventure was released on November 30, 2009, by Abrams Books. The book features detailed production artwork from the film, including production sketches, illustrations by Lisa Fitzpatrick, and film stills. Producer Jon Landau wrote the foreword, Cameron wrote the epilogue, and director Peter Jackson wrote the preface.[ In October 2010, Abrams Books also released The Making of Avatar, a 272 page book that detailed the film's production process and contains over 500 color photographs and illustrations.
Video games
Cameron chose Ubisoft Montreal to create an Avatar game for the film in 2007. The filmmakers and game developers collaborated heavily, and Cameron decided to include some of Ubisoft's vehicle and creature designs into the film. James Cameron's Avatar: The Game was released on December 1, 2009, for most home video game consoles (PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, Nintendo DS, iPhone), Microsoft Windows and December 8 for PSP.
Action figures and postage stamps
Mattel Toys announced in December 2009 that it would be introducing a line of Avatar action figures. Each action figure will be made with a 3-D web tag, called an i-TAG, that consumers can scan using a web cam, revealing unique on-screen content that is special to each specific action figure.
Release
Initial screening
Avatar premiered in London on December 10, 2009, and was released theatrically worldwide from December 16 to 18. The film was originally set for release on May 22, 2009, during filming, but was pushed back to allow more post-production time (the last shots were delivered in November), and to give more time for theatres worldwide to install 3-D projectors. Cameron stated that the film's aspect ratio would be 1.78:1 for 3-D screenings and that a 2.39:1 image would be extracted for 2-D screenings. However, a 3-D 2.39:1 extract was approved for use with constant-image-height screens (i.e. screens which increase in width to display 2.39:1 films). During a 3-D preview showing in Germany on December 16, the movie's DRM 'protection' system failed, and some copies delivered could not be watched at all the theaters. The problems were fixed in time for the public premiere, however. Avatar was released in a total of 3,457 theatres in the US, of which 2,032 theatres ran it in 3-D. In total 90% of all advance ticket sales for Avatar were for 3-D screenings.
Internationally, Avatar opened on a total of 14,604 screens in 106 territories, of which 3,671 were showing the film in 3-D (producing 56% of the first weekend gross).The film was simultaneously presented in IMAX 3D format, opening in 178 theaters in the United States on December 18. The international IMAX release included 58 theaters beginning on December 16, and 25 more theaters were to be added in the coming weeks.
Box office
General
Avatar earned $3,537,000 from midnight screenings domestically (United States and Canada), with the initial 3-D release limited to 2,200 screens. The film earned $26,752,099 on its opening day, and $77,025,481 over its opening weekend, making it the second largest December opening ever behind I Am Legend, the largest domestic opening weekend for a film not based on a franchise (topping The Incredibles), and the 25th largest national United States weekend opening, despite a blizzard which blanketed the East Coast of the United States and reportedly hurt its opening weekend results. The IMAX opening also broke box office records, with 178 theaters generating approximately $9.5 million, 13% of the film's $73 million (at the time) domestic gross on less than 3% of the screens.
International markets generating opening weekend tallies of at least $10 million were Russia ($19.7 million), France ($17.4 million), the UK ($13.8 million), Germany ($13.3 million), South Korea ($11.7 million), Australia ($11.5 million) and Spain ($11.0 million). Avatar's worldwide gross was $241.6 million after five days, the ninth largest opening-weekend gross of all time, and the largest for a non-franchise, non-sequel and original film. 58 international IMAX screens generated an estimated $4.1 million during the opening weekend.
The film's revenues decreased by 1.8% in its second weekend in domestic markets, marking a rare occurrence, earning $75,617,183, to remain in first place at the box office and recording the biggest second weekend of all time. The film experienced another small decrease in revenue in its third weekend, dropping 9.4% to $68,490,688 domestically, remaining in first place at the box office, to set a third-weekend record. On the 19th day of the film's international release, it crossed the $1 billion mark worldwide, making it the fastest film ever to do so and also making it the highest-grossing release of 2009 worldwide. In its fourth weekend, Avatar continued to lead the box office domestically, setting a new all-time fourth-weekend record of $50,306,217, and becoming the highest-grossing 2009 release in the United States. In the film's fifth weekend, it set the Martin Luther King Day four-day weekend record, grossing $54,401,446, and set a fifth-weekend record with a take of $42,785,612. It held to the top spot to set the sixth and seventh weekend records earning $34,944,081 and $31,280,029 respectively. On January 31 it became the first film to earn over $2 billion, and on February 27, after 72 days of domestic release, it became the first film to gross over $700 million. However, after inflation adjustment, the movie falls to fourteenth on the all-time box office list. It remained in the number one spot at the domestic box office for seven consecutive weeks—the most consecutive No. 1 weekends since Titanic spent 15 weekends at No. 1 in 1997–'98—and also spent 11 consecutive weekends at the top of the box office outside the United States and Canada, breaking the record of 9 consecutive weekends set by Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. By the end of its first theatrical release Avatar had grossed $749,766,139 in Canada and the U.S., and $1,990,639,582 in other territories, for a worldwide total of $2,740,405,721.
Commercial analysis
Before its release, various film critics and fan communities predicted the film would be a significant disappointment at the box office, in line with predictions made for Cameron's previous blockbuster Titanic. This criticism ranged from Avatar's film budget, to its concept and use of 3-D "blue cat people". Slate magazine's Daniel Engber complimented the 3-D effects, but criticized them for reminding him of certain CGI characters from the Star Wars prequel films and for having the "uncanny valley" effect. The New York Times noted that 20th Century Fox executives had decided to release Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel alongside Avatar, calling it a "secret weapon" to cover any unforeseeable losses at the box-office.
I think if everybody was embracing the film before the fact, the film could never live up to that expectation ... Have them go with some sense of wanting to find the answer.
James Cameron on criticism of Avatar before its release.
Box office analysts, on the other hand, estimated that the film would be a box office success. "The holy grail of 3-D has finally arrived," said an analyst for Exhibitor Relations. "This is why all these 3-D venues were built: for Avatar. This is the one. The behemoth." The "cautionary estimate" was that Avatar would bring in around $60 million in its opening weekend. Others guessed higher. Some analysts believed the film's three-dimensionality would help its box office performance, given that recent 3-D films had been successful.
Cameron said he felt the pressure of the predictions, but that pressure is good for film-makers. "It makes us think about our audiences and what the audience wants," he stated. "We owe them a good time. We owe them a piece of good entertainment." Although he felt Avatar would appeal to everyone and that the film could not afford to have a target demographic, he especially wanted hard-core science-fiction fans to see it: "If I can just get 'em in the damn theater, the film will act on them in the way it's supposed to, in terms of taking them on an amazing journey and giving them this rich emotional experience." Cameron was aware of the sentiment that Avatar would need significant "repeat business" just to make up for its budget and achieve box office success, and believed Avatar could inspire the same "sharing" reaction as Titanic. He said that film worked because, "When people have an experience that's very powerful in the movie theatre, they want to go share it. They want to grab their friend and bring them, so that they can enjoy it. They want to be the person to bring them the news that this is something worth having in their life."
After the film's release and unusually strong box office performance over its first two weeks, it was debated as the one film capable of surpassing Titanic's worldwide gross, and its continued strength perplexed box office analysts. Other films in recent years had been cited as contenders for surpassing Titanic, such as 2008's The Dark Knight, but Avatar was considered the first film with a genuine chance to do so, and its numbers being aided by higher ticket prices for 3-D screenings did not fully explain its success to box office analysts. "Most films are considered to be healthy if they manage anything less than a 50% drop from their first weekend to their second. Dipping just 11% from the first to the third is unheard of," relayed Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office analysis for Hollywood.com. "This is just unprecedented," he said. "I had to do a double take. I thought it was a miscalculation." Analysts predicted second place for the film's worldwide gross, but most were uncertain about it surpassing Titanic because "Today's films flame out much faster than they did when Titanic was released." Brandon Gray, president of Box Office Mojo, believed in the film's chances of becoming the highest-grossing film of all time, though he also believed it was too early to surmise because it had only played during the holidays. He said, "While Avatar may beat Titanic's revenue record, it will be tough, and the film is unlikely to surpass Titanic in attendance. Ticket prices were about $3 cheaper in the late 1990s." Cameron said he did not think it was realistic to "try to topple Titanic off its perch" because it "just struck some kind of chord" and there had been other good films in recent years. He changed his prediction by mid-January. "It's gonna happen. It's just a matter of time," he said.
You've got to compete head on with these other epic works of fantasy and fiction, the Tolkiens and the Star Wars and the Star Treks. People want a persistent alternate reality to invest themselves in and they want the detail that makes it rich and worth their time. They want to live somewhere else. Like Pandora.
James Cameron on the success of Avatar
Though analysts have been unable to agree that Avatar's success is attributable to one primary factor, several explanations have been advanced. First, January is historically "the dumping ground for the year's weakest films", and this also applied to 2010. Cameron himself said he decided to open the film in December so that it would have less competition from then into January. Titanic capitalized on the same January predictability, and earned most of its gross in 1998. Additionally, Avatar established itself as a "must-see" event. Gray said, "At this point, people who are going to see Avatar are going to see Avatar and would even if the slate was strong."
Critical reception
The film was well-received by film critics. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 83% of 275 professional critics have given the film a positive review, with a rating average of 7.4 out of 10.Among Rotten Tomatoes' Top Critics, which consists of popular and notable critics from the top newspapers, websites, television and radio programs, the film holds an overall approval rating of 95%, based on a total of 39 reviews. The site's consensus is that "It might be more impressive on a technical level than as a piece of storytelling, but Avatar reaffirms James Cameron's singular gift for imaginative, absorbing filmmaking." Metacritic, which assigns a weighted mean rating out of 100 reviews from film critics, the film has a rating score of 84% based on 35 reviews. CinemaScore polls conducted during the opening weekend revealed the average grade cinemagoers gave Avatar was A on an A+ to F scale. Every demographic surveyed was reported to give this rating. These polls also indicated that the main draw of the film was its use of 3-D.
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called the film "extraordinary" and gave it four stars out of four. "Watching Avatar, I felt sort of the same as when I saw Star Wars in 1977", he said. Like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings, the film "employs a new generation of special effects". A. O. Scott of At The Movies also compared his viewing of the film to the first time he viewed Star Wars, and added that although "the script is a little bit ... obvious," it was "part of what made it work". Todd McCarthy of Variety praised the film. "The King of the World sets his sights on creating another world entirely in Avatar, and it's very much a place worth visiting." Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter gave the film a positive review. "The screen is alive with more action and the soundtrack pops with more robust music than any dozen sci-fi shoot-'em-ups you care to mention" he stated. Evo Morales, Bolivia's first indigenous president, praised the film for its "profound show of resistance to capitalism and the struggle for the defense of nature". Russell D. Moore in The Christian Post concluded that propaganda exists in the film and stated, "If you can get a theater full of people in Kentucky to stand and applaud the defeat of their country in war, then you've got some amazing special effects." Some commentators sympathetic to Anarcho-primitivism have even praised the film as a manifesto for their cause. Adam Cohen of The New York Times was more positive about the film, calling its anti-imperialist message "a 22nd-century version of the American colonists vs. the British, India vs. the Raj, or Latin America vs. United Fruit". Ross Douthat of The New York Times opined that the film is "Cameron's long apologia for pantheism ... Hollywood's religion of choice for a generation now", while Saritha Prabhu of The Tennessean called the film a misportrayal of pantheism and Eastern spirituality in general, and Maxim Osipov of The Hindustan Times, on the contrary, commended the film's message for its overall consistency with the teachings of Hinduism in the Bhagavad Gita. Various reviews have compared Avatar to the films FernGully: The Last Rainforest, Pocahontas and The Last Samurai. NPR's Morning Edition has compared the film to a montage of tropes, with one commentator stating that Avatar was made by mixing a bunch of film scripts in a blender. Some sources noted similarities to the artwork of Roger Dean, which featured fantastic images of floating rock formations and dragons. Similarities have been found between Avatar and Ursula Le Guin's novel The Word for World is Forest, with Gary Westfahl writing for Locus Online that "... the science fiction story that most closely resembles Avatar has to be Ursula K. Le Guin's novella "The Word for World Is Forest" (1972), another epic about a benevolent race of alien beings who happily inhabit dense forests while living in harmony with nature until they are attacked and slaughtered by invading human soldiers who believe that the only good gook is a dead gook.
Accolades received by Avatar
Avatar was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. It won the awards for Art Direction, Cinematography, and Visual Effects. The New York Film Critics Online honored the film with its Best Picture award. The film also received nine nominations for the Critics' Choice Awards of the Broadcast Film Critics Association, winning in the Best Action Film and several technical categories. It won two of the St. Louis Film Critics awards: Best Visual Effects and Most Original, Innovative or Creative Film. Avatar also picked up four nominations for the 67th Golden Globe Awards, winning for Best Motion Picture – Drama and Best Director. The film also received eight nominations from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), including Best Film and Director, but won for only Production Design and Special Visual Effects. The film has additionally received various other awards, nominations and honors.
Extended theatrical re-release
In July 2010, Cameron confirmed that there would be a extended theatrical re-release of the film on August 27, 2010, exclusively in 3-D theaters and IMAX 3D. Avatar: Special Edition includes an additional nine minutes of footage, all of which is CG,including an extension of the sex scene and various other scenes that were cut from the original theatrical film. This extended re-release resulted in the film's run time approaching the current IMAX platter maximum of 170 minutes, thereby leaving less time for the end credits. Cameron stated that the nine minutes of added scenes cost more than $1 million a minute to produce and finish. During its 12 week re-release, Avatar: Special Edition grossed an additional $10.7 million domestically and $22.4 million worldwide.
Home media
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment released the film on DVD and Blu-ray in the US on April 22, 2010 and in the UK on April 26. The US release was not on a Tuesday as is the norm, but was done to coincide with Earth Day. The first DVD and Blu-ray release does not contain any supplemental features other than the theatrical film and the disc menu in favor of and to make space for optimal picture and sound. The release also preserves the film's native 1.78:1 (16:9) format as Cameron felt that was the best format to watch the film. The Blu-ray disc contains DRM (BD+ 5) which some Blu-ray players might not support without a firmware update.
Avatar set a first-day launch record in the U.S. for Blu-ray sales at 1.5 million units sold, breaking the record previously held by The Dark Knight (600,000 units sold). First-day DVD and Blu-ray sales combined were over 4 million units sold. In its first four days of release, sales of Avatar on Blu-ray reached 2.7 million in the United States and Canada – overtaking The Dark Knight to become the best ever selling Blu-ray release in the region. The release later broke the Blu-ray sales record in the UK the following week. In its first three weeks of release, the film sold a total of 19.7 million DVD and Blu-ray discs combined, a new record for sales in that period. As of July 31, 2011, DVD sales (not including Blu-ray) totaled over 10.4 million units sold with $189 million in revenue.Cameron mentioned, "you can sit down, and in a continuous screening of the film, watch it with the Earth opening". He stated the "Earth opening" is an additional 4 1/2 minutes of scenes that were in the film for much of its production but were ultimately cut before the film's theatrical release. The release also includes an additional 45 minutes of deleted scenes and other extras.
Cameron initially stated that Avatar would be released in 3-D around November 2010, but the studio issued a correction: "3-D is in the conceptual stage and Avatar will not be out on 3D Blu-ray in November." In May 2010, Fox stated that the 3-D version would be released some time in 2011. It was later revealed that Fox had given Panasonic an exclusive license for the 3-D Blu-ray version and only with the purchase of a Panasonic 3DTV. The length of Panasonic's exclusivity period is stated to last until February 2012.On October 2010, Cameron stated that the standalone 3-D Blu-ray would be the final version of the film's home release and that it was, "maybe one, two years out".
On Christmas Eve 2010, Avatar had its 3-D television world premiere on Sky.
Sequels
In 2006, Cameron stated that if Avatar was successful, he hoped to make two sequels to the film. In 2010, he said the film's widespread success confirmed that he will.The prospect of sequels was something he planned from the start, going so far as to include certain scenes in the film for future story followups. Cameron said he wants to make the sequel "cheaper and faster" and that the story will be a continuation of the characters introduced in Avatar.When being interviewed by AP on the red carpet of the 82nd Academy Awards, Cameron stated "if I were to start Avatar 2 tomorrow, it would still be three years away." In an August 2010 interview, Cameron stated that his plans are to shoot both sequels in the planned trilogy back-to-back and that he was waiting for deals to be made. He also mentioned, "what I'm working on primarily is the novel" and "presumably, once the novel is nailed down, work will begin in earnest on getting the sequel going." In an interview in Perth's Sunday Times on September 12, 2010, Cameron revealed his intention to capture footage for this sequel at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. For this purpose he has commissioned a deepwater submersible. In October 2010, Cameron officially signed an agreement with Fox to direct two sequels to Avatar, which are scheduled to be released in December 2014 and December 2015. Both sequels will be produced by Cameron's own Lightstorm Entertainment in partnership with 20th Century Fox.
Though plots for future sequels have not been laid out yet, Cameron stated that they are going to widen the universe while exploring other moons of Polyphemus. The first sequel will focus on the ocean of Pandora but will also feature more of the rainforest from the original movie. It will continue to follow the characters of Jake and Neytiri. Cameron implied that the humans would return as the antagonists of the story. "I expect that those nasty humans didn't go away forever," he said. Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana have signed on to reprise their roles in future sequels, and Stephen Lang, who played Colonel Miles Quaritch, believes his character could make a return: "You think those two arrows in my chest are going to stop me from coming back?" Lang told Entertainment Weekly, "Nothing's over so long as they've got my DNA.
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