Principal photography for Avatar began in April 2007 in Los Angeles and Wellington. 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.[66] The live action was shot with a modified version of the proprietary digital 3-D Fusion Camera System, developed by Cameron and Vince Pace.[67] 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.[68] According to Cameron, the film is composed of 60% computer-generated elements and 40% live action, as well as traditional miniatures.[69] Motion-capture photography lasted 31 days at the Hughes Aircraft stage in Playa Vista in Los Angeles.[54][70] Live action photography began in October 2007 at Stone Street Studios in Wellington and was scheduled to last 31 days.[71] More than a thousand people worked on the production.[70] 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.[72] Before shooting the film, Cameron also sent the cast to the Hawaiian tropical rainforests[73] to get a feel for a rainforest setting before shooting on the soundstage.[72] During filming, Cameron made use of his virtual camera system, a new way of directing motion-capture filmmaking. The system shows 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."[74] 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.[75] 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".[76] Cameron gave fellow directors Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson a chance to test the new technology.[65] Spielberg said, "I like to think of it as digital makeup, not augmented animation ... Motion capture brings the director back to a kind of intimacy that actors and directors only know when they're working in live theater."[75] Spielberg and George Lucas were also able to visit the set to watch Cameron direct with the equipment.[77] To film the shots where CGI interacts with live action, a unique camera referred to as a "simulcam" was used, a merger of the 3-D fusion camera and the virtual camera systems. While filming live action in real time with the simulcam, the CGI images captured with the virtual camera or designed from scratch, are superimposed over the live action images as in augmented reality and shown on a small monitor, making it possible for the director to instruct the actors how to relate to the virtual material in the scene.[72] Due to Cameron's personal convictions about climate change, he allowed only plant-based (vegan) food to be served on set. |
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A number of innovative visual effects techniques were used during production. 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.[13][14] 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.[74] Innovations include a new system for lighting massive areas like Pandora's jungle,[80] 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.[81] According to Cameron, the method allows the filmmakers to transfer 100% of the actors' physical performances to their digital counterparts.[82] Besides the performance capture data which were transferred directly to the computers, numerous reference cameras gave the digital artists multiple angles of each performance.[83] 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.[84] The lead visual effects company was Weta Digital in Wellington, at one point employing 900 people to work on the film.[85] 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.[86] To render Avatar, Weta used a 930 m2 (10,000 sq ft) server farm making use of 4,000 Hewlett-Packard servers with 35,000 processor cores with 104 terabytes of RAM and three petabytes of network area storage running Ubuntu Linux, Grid Engine cluster manager, and 2 of the animation software and managers, Pixar's RenderMan and Pixar's Alfred queue management system.[87][88][89][90] 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.[91][92] Creating the Na'vi characters and the virtual world of Pandora required over a petabyte of digital storage,[93] and each minute of the final footage for Avatar occupies 17.28 gigabytes of storage.[94] It would often take the computer several hours to render a single frame of the film.[95] To help finish preparing the special effects sequences on time, a number of other companies were brought on board, including Industrial Light & Magic, which worked alongside Weta Digital to create the battle sequences. ILM was responsible for the visual effects for many of the film's specialized vehicles and devised a new way to make CGI explosions.[96] Joe Letteri was the film's visual effects general supervisor.[97] Music and soundtrack Main article: Avatar: Music from the Motion Picture James Horner – "Jake Enters His Avatar World" 0:32 listen to a clip from the score of the 2009 film Avatar. Problems playing this file? See media help. Composer James Horner scored the film, his third collaboration with Cameron after Aliens and Titanic.[98] Horner recorded parts of the score with a small chorus singing in the alien language Na'vi in March 2008.[99] He also worked with Wanda Bryant, an ethnomusicologist, to create a music culture for the alien race.[100] The first scoring sessions were planned to take place in early 2009.[101] 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 until 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."[102] Horner composed the score as two different scores merged into one. He first created a score that reflected the Na'vi way of sound and then combined it with a separate "traditional" score to drive the film.[72] British singer Leona Lewis was chosen to sing the theme song for the film, called "I See You". An accompanying music video, directed by Jake Nava, premiered December 15, 2009, on MySpace. |
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Avatar is primarily an action-adventure journey of self-discovery, in the context of imperialism, and deep ecology.[104] Cameron said his inspiration was "every single science fiction book I read as a kid" and that he wanted to update the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter series.[11] He 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.[105][106] He also cited Hayao Miyazaki's anime films such as Princess Mononoke as an influence on the ecosystem of Pandora.[106] In 2012, Cameron filed a 45-page legal declaration that intended to "describe in great detail the genesis of the ideas, themes, storylines, and images that came to be Avatar."[107] In addition to historical events (such as European colonization of the Americas), his life experiences and several of his unproduced projects, Cameron drew connections between Avatar and his previous films. He cited his script and concept art for Xenogenesis, partially produced as a short film, as being the basis for many of the ideas and visual designs in Avatar. He stated that Avatar's "concepts of a world mind, intelligence within nature, the idea of projecting force or consciousness using an avatar, colonization of alien planets, greedy corporate interests backed up by military force, the story of a seemingly weaker group prevailing over a technologically superior force, and the good scientist were all established and recurrent themes" from his earlier films including Aliens, The Abyss, Rambo: First Blood Part II, The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. He specifically mentioned the "water tentacle" in The Abyss as an example of an "avatar" that "takes on the appearance of...an alien life form...in order to bridge the cultural gap and build trust."[108] Cameron also cited a number of works by other creators as "reference points and sources of inspiration" for Avatar. These include two of his "favorite" films, 2001: A Space Odyssey, where mankind experiences an evolution after meeting alien life, and Lawrence of Arabia, where "an outsider...encounters and immerses into a foreign culture and then ultimately joins that group to fight other outsiders." Cameron said he became familiar with the concept of a human operating a "synthetic avatar" inside another world from George Henry Smith's short story "In the Imagicon" and Arthur C. Clarke's novel The City and the Stars. He said he learned of the term "avatar" by reading the cyberpunk novels Neuromancer by William Gibson and Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling. The idea of a "world mind" originated in the novel Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. Cameron mentioned several other films about people interacting with "indigenous cultures" as inspiring him, including Dances with Wolves, The Man Who Would Be King, The Mission, The Emerald Forest, Medicine Man, The Jungle Book and FernGully. He also cited as inspiration the John Carter and Tarzan stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs and other adventure stories by Rudyard Kipling and H. Rider Haggard.[108] 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."[10] Cameron also cited the Japanese cyberpunk manga and anime Ghost in the Shell, in terms of how humans can remotely control, and transfer their personalities into, alien bodies.[109][110] For the love story between characters Jake and Neytiri, Cameron applied a star-crossed love theme, which he said was in the tradition of Romeo and Juliet.[108] He acknowledged its similarity to the pairing of Jack and Rose from his film Titanic. An interviewer stated, "Both couples come from radically different cultures that are contemptuous of their relationship and are forced to choose sides between the competing communities."[113] Cameron described Neytiri as his "Pocahontas," saying that his plotline followed the historical story of a "white outsider [who] falls in love with the chief's daughter, who becomes his guide to the tribe and to their special bond with nature."[108] Cameron felt that whether or not the Jake and Neytiri love story would be perceived as believable partially hinged on the physical attractiveness of Neytiri's alien appearance, which was developed by considering her appeal to the all-male crew of artists.[114] Although Cameron felt Jake and Neytiri do not fall in love right away, their portrayers (Worthington and Saldana) felt the characters did. Cameron said the two actors "had a great chemistry" during filming.[113] A gray mountain in the middle of a forest. Pandora's floating "Hallelujah Mountains" were inspired in part by the Chinese Huangshan mountains (pictured).[115] Zhangjiajie National Forest Park 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."[116] According to production designer Dylan Cole, the fictional floating rocks were inspired by Huangshan (also known as Yellow Mountain), Guilin, Zhangjiajie, among others around the world.[116] Cameron had noted the influence of the Chinese peaks on the design of the floating mountains.[117] To create the interiors of the human mining colony on Pandora, production designers visited the Noble Clyde Boudreaux[118] oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico during June 2007. They photographed, measured and filmed every aspect of the platform, which was later replicated on-screen with photorealistic CGI during post-production. |
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The first photo of the film was released on August 14, 2009,[124] and Empire released exclusive images from the film in its October issue.[125] 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[126] in Dolby 3D.[127] Weaver and Cameron appeared at additional panels to promote the film, speaking on the 23rd[128] and 24th[129][130] respectively. James Cameron announced at the Comic-Con Avatar Panel that August 21 will be 'Avatar Day'. On this day, the trailer was released in all theatrical formats. The official game trailer and toy line of the film were also unveiled on this day.[131] The 129-second trailer was released online on August 20, 2009.[132] The new 210-second trailer was premiered in theaters on October 23, 2009, then soon after premiered online on Yahoo! on October 29, 2009, to positive reviews.[133][134] An extended version in IMAX 3D received overwhelmingly positive reviews.[132] The Hollywood Reporter said that audience expectations were colored by "the [same] establishment skepticism that preceded Titanic" and suggested the showing reflected the desire for original storytelling.[135] 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.[136] 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.[137] 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.[138] The Coca-Cola Company collaborated with 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.[139] The film was heavily promoted in an episode of the Fox series Bones in the episode "The Gamer In The Grease" (Season 5, Episode 9). Avatar star Joel David Moore has a recurring role on the program, and is seen in the episode anxiously awaiting the release of the film.[140] A week prior to the American release, Zoe Saldana promoted the film on Adult Swim when she was interviewed by an animated Space Ghost.[141] McDonald's had a promotion mentioned in television commercials in Europe called "Avatarize yourself", which encouraged people to go to the website set up by Oddcast, and use a photograph of themselves to change into a Na'vi.[142] 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.[143] 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.[144] The Art of Avatar 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.[145] 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.[146] In a 2009 interview, Cameron said that he planned to write a novel version of Avatar after the film was released.[147] In February 2010, producer Jon Landau stated that Cameron plans a prequel novel for Avatar that will "lead up to telling the story of the movie, but it would go into much more depth about all the stories that we didn't have time to deal with", saying that "Jim wants to write a novel that is a big, epic story that fills in a lot of things".[148] In August 2013 it was announced that Cameron hired Steven Gould to pen four standalone novels to expand the Avatar universe.[149] ance Post released a special limited edition stamp based on Avatar, coinciding with the film's worldwide release. |
Initial screening Avatar premiered in London on December 10, 2009, and was released theatrically worldwide from December 16 to 18.[156] The film was originally set for release on May 22, 2009, during filming[157] but was pushed back to allow more post-production time (the last shots were delivered in November)[80] and give more time for theaters worldwide to install 3D projectors.[158] Cameron stated that the film's aspect ratio would be 1.78:1 for 3D screenings and that a 2.39:1 image would be extracted for 2D screenings.[159][160] However, a 3D 2.39:1 extract was approved for use with constant-image-height screens (i.e., screens that increase in width to display 2.39:1 films).[161] During a 3D preview showing in Germany on December 16, the movie's DRM "protection" system malfunctioned, and some copies delivered weren't watched at all in the theaters. The problems were fixed in time for the public premiere.[162] Avatar was released in a total of 3,457 theaters in the US, of which 2,032 theaters showed it in 3D. In total, 90% of all advance ticket sales for Avatar were for 3D screenings.[163] Internationally, Avatar opened on a total of 14,604 screens in 106 territories, of which 3,671 were showing the film in 3D (producing 56% of the first weekend gross).[164][165] 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.[166] The IMAX release was the company's widest to date, a total of 261 theaters worldwide. The previous IMAX record opening was Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which opened in 161 IMAX theaters in the US, and about 70 international.[167] 20th Century Fox Korea adapted and later released Avatar in 4D version, which included "moving seats, smells of explosives, sprinkling water, laser lights and wind".[20] Post-original release In July 2010, Cameron confirmed that there would be an extended theatrical rerelease of the film on August 27, 2010, exclusively in 3D theaters and IMAX 3D.[168] Avatar: Special Edition includes an additional nine minutes of footage, all of which is CG,[169] including an extension of the sex scene[170] and various other scenes that were cut from the original theatrical film.[169] This extended re-release resulted in the film's run time approaching the then-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.[171] During its 12-week re-release, Avatar: Special Edition grossed an additional $10.74 million in North America and $22.46 million overseas for a worldwide total of $33.2 million.[5] The film was later re-released in China in March 2021, allowing it to surpass Avengers: Endgame to become the highest-grossing film of all time.[24] Avatar was re-released in theaters on September 23, 2022, by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures for a limited two week engagement, with the film being remastered in 4K high-dynamic range, with select scenes at a high frame rate of 48-frames-per-second.[172] The reissue was prior to the December 2022 premiere of its sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water.[173] Prior to this, Cameron previously teased a re-release of the film back in 2017 when promoting the Dolby Cinema re-release of Titanic, stating that there were plans in the works to remaster the film with Dolby Vision and re-release it in Dolby Cinema. |
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Home media 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment released the film on DVD and Blu-ray in the US on April 22, 2010,[175] and in the UK on April 26.[176] The US release was not on a Tuesday as is the norm, but was done to coincide with Earth Day.[177] 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.[178] The Blu-ray disc contains DRM (BD+ 5) which some Blu-ray players might not support without a firmware update.[179][180] 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 four million units sold.[181] 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.[182][183] The release later broke the Blu-ray sales record in the UK the following week.[184] 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.[185] As of July 18, 2012, DVD sales (not including Blu-ray) totaled over 10.5 million units sold with $190,806,055 in revenue.[186] Avatar retained its record as the top-selling Blu-ray in the US market until January 2015, when it was surpassed by Disney's Frozen.[187] The Avatar three-disc Extended Collector's Edition on DVD and Blu-ray was released on November 16, 2010. Three different versions of the film are present on the discs: the original theatrical cut (162 minutes), the special edition cut (170 minutes), and a collector's extended cut (178 minutes). The DVD set spreads the film across two discs, while the Blu-ray set presents it on a single disc.[188] The collector's extended cut contains 8 more minutes of footage, thus making it 16 minutes longer than the original theatrical cut. 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.[189] The release also includes an additional 45 minutes of deleted scenes and other extras.[188] Cameron initially stated that Avatar would be released in 3D 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."[190] In May 2010, Fox stated that the 3D version would be released some time in 2011.[185] It was later revealed that Fox had given Panasonic an exclusive license for the 3D 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.[191] On October 2010, Cameron stated that the standalone 3D Blu-ray would be the final version of the film's home release and that it was "maybe one, two years out".[192] On Christmas Eve 2010, Avatar had its 3D television world premiere on Sky.[193][194][195] On August 13, 2012, Cameron announced on Facebook that Avatar would be released globally on Blu-ray 3D.[196] The Blu-ray 3D version was finally released on October 16, 2012.[197] Reception Critical response On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 82% of 319 reviews are positive, and the average rating is 7.4/10. The site's consensus reads, "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."[198] On Metacritic — which assigns a weighted mean score — the film has a score of 83 out of 100 based on 35 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[199] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "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 3D.[200] 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, adding that like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the film "employs a new generation of special effects" and it "is not simply a sensational entertainment, although it is that. It's a technical breakthrough. It has a flat-out Green and anti-war message".[201] A. O. Scott of At The Movies also compared his viewing of the film to the first time he viewed Star Wars and he said "although the script is a little bit ... obvious," it was "part of what made it work".[202][203] Todd McCarthy of Variety praised the film, saying "The King of the World sets his sights on creating another world entirely in Avatar, and it's very much a place worth visiting."[204] 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.[205] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone awarded Avatar a three-and-a-half out of four star rating and wrote in his print review "It extends the possibilities of what movies can do. Cameron's talent may just be as big as his dreams."[206] Richard Corliss of Time magazine thought that the film was "the most vivid and convincing creation of a fantasy world ever seen in the history of moving pictures."[207] Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times thought the film has "powerful" visual accomplishments but "flat dialogue" and "obvious characterization".[208] James Berardinelli of ReelViews praised the film and its story, giving it four out of four stars; he wrote "In 3-D, it's immersive – but the traditional film elements – story, character, editing, theme, emotional resonance, etc. – are presented with sufficient expertise to make even the 2-D version an engrossing 2+1⁄2-hour experience."[209] Avatar's underlying social and political themes attracted attention. Armond White of the New York Press wrote that Cameron used "villainous American characters" to "misrepresent facets of militarism, capitalism, and imperialism".[210][211] Russell D. Moore of 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."[212] 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".[213] 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",[214] while Saritha Prabhu of The Tennessean called the film a "misportrayal of pantheism and Eastern spirituality in general",[215] 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.[216] Annalee Newitz of io9 concluded that Avatar is another film that has the recurring "fantasy about race" whereby "some white guy" becomes the "most awesome" member of a non-white culture.[217] Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune called Avatar "the season's ideological Rorschach blot",[218] while Miranda Devine of The Sydney Morning Herald thought that "It [was] impossible to watch Avatar without being banged over the head with the director's ideological hammer."[219] Nidesh Lawtoo believed that an essential, yet less visible social theme that contributed to Avatar's success concerns contemporary fascinations with virtual avatars and "the transition from the world of reality to that of virtual reality".[220] Critics and audiences have cited similarities with other films, literature or media, describing the perceived connections in ways ranging from simple "borrowing" to outright plagiarism. Ty Burr of The Boston Globe called it "the same movie" as Dances with Wolves.[221] Like Dances with Wolves, Avatar has been characterized as being a "white savior" movie, in which a "backwards" native people is impotent without the leadership of a member of the invading white culture.[222][223] Parallels to the concept and use of an avatar are in Poul Anderson's 1957 novelette "Call Me Joe", in which a paralyzed man uses his mind from orbit to control an artificial body on Jupiter.[224][225] Cinema audiences in Russia have noted that Avatar has elements in common with the 1960s Noon Universe novels by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, which are set in the 22nd century on a forested world called Pandora with a sentient indigenous species called the Nave.[226] Various reviews have compared Avatar to the films FernGully: The Last Rainforest,[227][228] Pocahontas[229] and The Last Samurai.[230] 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".[231] Gary Westfahl wrote that "the science fiction story that most closely resembles Avatar has to be Ursula 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".[225] The science fiction writer and editor Gardner Dozois said that along with the Anderson and Le Guin stories, the "mash-up" included Alan Dean Foster's 1975 novel, Midworld.[232] Some sources saw similarities to the artwork of Roger Dean, which features fantastic images of dragons and floating rock formations.[233][234] In 2013, Dean sued Cameron and Fox, claiming that Pandora was inspired by 14 of his images. Dean sought damages of $50m.[235] Dean's case was dismissed in 2014, and The Hollywood Reporter noted that Cameron had won multiple Avatar idea theft cases.[236] Avatar received compliments from filmmakers, with Steven Spielberg praising it as "the most evocative and amazing science-fiction movie since Star Wars" and others calling it "audacious and awe inspiring", "master class", and "brilliant". Noted art director-turned-filmmaker Roger Christian is also a noted fan of the film.[237] On the other hand, Duncan Jones said: "It's not in my top three James Cameron films. ... [A]t what point in the film did you have any doubt what was going to happen next?".[238] For French filmmaker Luc Besson, Avatar opened the doors for him to now create an adaptation of the graphic novel series Valรฉrian and Laureline that technologically supports the scope of its source material, with Besson even throwing his original script in the trash and redoing it after seeing the film.[239] TIME ranked Avatar number 3 in their list of "The 10 Greatest Movies of the Millennium (Thus Far)"[240] also earning it a spot on the magazine's All-Time 100 list,[241] and IGN listed Avatar as number 22 on their list of the top 25 Sci-Fi movies of all time. |
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| 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.[294] Other films in recent years had been cited as contenders for surpassing Titanic, such as 2008's The Dark Knight,[295] but Avatar was considered the first film with a genuine chance to do so, and its numbers being aided by higher ticket prices for 3D screenings[294] 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," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office analysis for Hollywood.com. "This is just unprecedented. I had to do a double take. I thought it was a miscalculation."[296] 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."[296] 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 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."[296] 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.[297] He changed his prediction by mid-January. "It's gonna happen. It's just a matter of time," he said.[298] 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[299] Although 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.[300] Cameron himself said he decided to open the film in December so that it would have less competition from then to January.[287] Titanic capitalized on the same January predictability, and earned most of its gross in 1998.[300] 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."[300] Marketing the film as a "novelty factor" also helped. Fox positioned the film as a cinematic event that should be seen in the theaters. "It's really hard to sell the idea that you can have the same experience at home," stated David Mumpower, an analyst at BoxOfficeProphets.com.[300] The "Oscar buzz" surrounding the film and international viewings helped. "Two-thirds of Titanic's haul was earned overseas, and Avatar [tracked] similarly ...Avatar opened in 106 markets globally and was No. 1 in all of them", and the markets "such as Russia, where Titanic saw modest receipts in 1997 and 1998, are white-hot today" with "more screens and moviegoers" than before.[300] According to Variety, films in 3D accumulated $1.3 billion in 2009, "a threefold increase over 2008 and more than 10% of the total 2009 box-office gross". The increased ticket price – an average of $2 to $3 per ticket in most markets – helped the film.[300] Likewise, Entertainment Weekly attributed the film's success to 3D glasses but also to its "astronomic word-of-mouth". Not only do some theaters charge up to $18.50 for IMAX tickets, but "the buzz" created by the new technology was the possible cause for sold-out screenings.[301] Gray said Avatar having no basis in previously established material makes its performance remarkable and even more impressive. "The movie might be derivative of many movies in its story and themes," he said, "but it had no direct antecedent like the other top-grossing films: Titanic (historical events), the Star Wars movies (an established film franchise), or The Lord of the Rings (literature). It was a tougher sell ..."[300] The Hollywood Reporter estimated that after a combined production and promotion cost of between $387–437 million, the film turned a net profit of $1.2 billion. |
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