Originally published at: James Cameron might not direct Avatar 4 & 5 | Boing Boing
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Why would they make a four and five?
Has anyone shown any interest in two in the past decade?
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It’s for the best. Really, though, the problem is not so much with the directing as it is with the writing.
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He always said it was going to be a five-movie franchise, but until recently I don’t think many people believed him. #2 is in production now, and was delayed because he said it wanted to break it up into #2 and #3, kinda like how Back To The Future 2 and 3 were filmed at the same time.
As for, “does anyone want two of those movies, never mind five?” the answer is apparently yes, but I don’t understand why. I certainly won’t watch them. The first one was just “meh” for me, so I honestly can’t understand why it’s the highest grossing movie of all time. It is though, so there does seem to be a huge audience for it.
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Wasn’t it the first major movie in 3D?
It was a dumb, stupid story.
Now I’m wondering if Edgar Wright put that “dogs don’t look up” line in Sean of the Dead because those huge predator dragons never looked up in Avatar…
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Hasn’t Avatar 2 already been released?
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And it’s not like he didn’t have plenty of time to work on the script. I read his treatment some ten years before the movie came out.
I’d much rather have more Alita
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Well as it is going to be about 13-15 years between Avatar 1 and 2, and the fact that Cameron is 67 years old right now, I’d say it makes sense that someone else will do the later films in the series…
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Yay white-savior colonialism flick!
And none of the Indigenous folk ever thought to try the same gambit? Yay white savior!
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My prediction? Unless the next movie introduces some really wicked movie-going experience (better than 3D, vibrating seats and smell-O-vision), the sequels are going to suck and will ruin the studio.
And will that technology work for other films? Will it even be worth it for theaters to install costly new projection gear for potentially a one-off?
Cameron is an over-hyped hack.
How The Blue Cat People Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb.
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Considering how he treats the filmmaking process it might not be physically possible for him to make several huge movies in quick succession. I think everyone on a Cameron production needs several months of R&R afterwards
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Well a lot of them did so for the 3D fad so they may do so again.
Swapping out the 3D projectors to show non 3D movies is too much of a hassle for most movie theaters. This results in them showing 2D movies through the 3D apparatus, resulting in darker movies since you’re basically throwing away half the light due to polarization.
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Yeah, the first one was a huge success because it was a visual feast that for the first time used the 3D process to its full potential. The story, as detailed here, was meh and problematic.
I disagree. I genuinely like The Abyss and some of his other work. His fascination with the ocean carries over in films like that, which is why I have some hope for the Water Avatar sequel, but not the rest.
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It was “Dances with Wolves…in space.
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Ferngully In Space.
But yeah.
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The Abyss was a great film indeed, probably his best. He makes big & loud films to hero whatever new technology or folly he’s keen on at that particular moment. Not saying his movies are terrible, just that he relies on that wizardry to carry the films at the expense of the little things that make other movies good.
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No it just went fairly all in on the 3d and was one of the first couple of non-documentary films to shoot entirely on Cameron’s 3d system. I think it was actually one of the last films to shoot entirely in native 3d, instead of shooting action sequences and doing the rest with post conversion.
Most major theaters had done a forced upgrade to 3d between 2003-2005. And 3d ticket sales started to collapse in 2010.
The bigger theater chains were game for it because the higher ticket price mostly stayed in their pockets. But the 3d upgrade was a forced one, and predated the fad. It kinda created the fad Distributors and studios required a certain number of 3d showings for access, many theaters either got shut out when they couldn’t afford it. Or went broke buying projectors. In either case and theater with the projected needed to lean hard into 3d showings to pay them off.
There’s already been another forced upgrade since then, to more modern all digital 4k projectors.
IIRC this is not the issue. Most theaters run their projectors darker than they’re supposed to preserve the very expensive lamp. They’re like 20-50k a bulb. And the whole theater business is pretty unstable at the moment.
On top of that the chains colluded with studios to crush the projectionists union in the 90’s an 00’s. It’s part of what that forced upgrade cycle allowed them to do. So most theaters do not have a dedicated projectionist. Chains will send a guy by occasionally. But a lot of times projectionists come from the studios or distributors enforcing standards. The Disney guy comes by to set the projector to Disney standards, at the theater’s expense. Then a non-projectionist manager sneaks in and dims it 20% or more.
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If the Back to the Future sequels were delayed by this long then the final film in the trilogy would have been released closer in time to the then-futuristic world of 2015 than to Marty’s own time of 1985.
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Back To What Was Going To Be The Future isn’t as catchy a title, so they had to hustle on that production to finish in a timely fashion.
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