James Cameron make Avatar: The Way of Water

It’s been 13 long years since Avatar—or any other film directed by James Cameron—debuted on the big screen. Hollywood has transformed since then: In 2009, Blockbuster hadn’t even declared bankruptcy yet.
Since then, Disney has acquired 20th Century Fox, the studio that financed the first Avatar movie; expensive action films without superheroes now rarely get the green light, unless they star Tom Cruise; and streaming has crippled the movie theatre business.

Yet Avatar remains the highest-grossing movie in history. When Avengers: Endgame briefly ascended to that top spot in 2020, Cameron launched a re-release of Avatar in China to recapture the title. It worked: The film has now grossed $2.9 billion in total. The director has long planned to make several sequels, but each year, when Disney would announce its upcoming slate, they’d add an addendum that the Avatar followups had been delayed yet again. Fans started to question whether Avatar 2, much less Avatar 3, 4, or 5, would ever be released.

The sequel is finally here after years of filming in New Zealand; Avatar: The Way of Water will premiere on December 16. The movie centres on former human soldier Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), who fell in love with the planet of Pandora and the Na'vi warrior Neytiri (Zoe Saldaa) in the first movie. It is set almost 15 years after the events of the first movie. Jake transitioned out of his human form to become a Na'vi. The couple now has three children, one of whom is voiced by Sigourney Weaver, who played a human character that died in the first film.

As the title suggests, much of Avatar 2 is set in and around the ocean and introduces a new oceanic tribe of Na’vi called the Metkayina. The 2024 release date for Avatar 3, which was simultaneously filmed, has been set. The final two instalments are scheduled for 2026 and 2028. Here’s why it took so long to make the Avatar sequel and why we’re getting so many followups in the coming years.

James Cameron took time for real-world exploration

Cameron is an avowed lover of the sea. He has dived to the Titanic wreck several times; according to the legend, on September 11, 2001, Cameron and actor Bill Paxton were eating in a submarine on the deck of the Titanic and only heard about the terror attacks after they emerged from the water.

Cameron constructed a submarine in 2012 to take him to the Mariana Trench, the ocean's deepest point, after Avatar was finished. He became the first person in history to descend the 6.8 miles solo.

He also spent time after the first Avatar movie advocating for meat alternatives for both environmental and health reasons. He and his wife invested in a Saskatchewan pea-protein facility and worked on the 2018 documentary Game Changers about athletes who follow vegan diets. (They have since sold their stake.)

In a recent GQ profile, he said, "I tried to come up with a good term for it because vegan has all those connotations." How many vegans are required to install a light bulb? ’ ‘It doesn’t matter. You just want to punch a vegan because "I'm better than you." The term I came up with is futurevore, which is short for "punch a vegan today: It'll feel good." We are eating today what people will eat tomorrow. Simply put, we're starting early.

 

Three movies morphed into five

Originally conceived as a trilogy, the Avatar franchise ballooned in Cameron’s mind. The director set up a writers' room to assist him in 2013 and started planning the sequels in 2012. In a recent interview with the New York Times, he said, "It just wound up with more story than I bargained for. He added that writing the next four movies took four years.


The new films would introduce new groups of Na’vi and new locations on Pandora. Avatar took an incredibly detailed approach to introducing the flora and fauna of the fictional planet, and how nature interconnected with the customs of its alien inhabitants, the Na’vi. The authors had to create new biomes for Pandora's newest regions, as well as its inhabitants' traditions and wardrobes for the characters—visual elements that took another five years to create.

Amidst all that creative development, Cameron became deeply involved in the creation of the Disney Parks rides, Avatar Flight of Passage and Na’vi River Journey. The first is a VR experience unlike any other in the Disney Parks, and Cameron contributed his high-tech know-how to the idea. He also assumed the role of the area's architect, inspired by Pandora and built around a sizable fake tree in Disney World.

James Cameron had to spend money on new subaquatic technology.

Avatar still looks stunning more than ten years after it was first released. That's partly due to the sophisticated motion-capture technology used by Cameron to accurately recreate each natural facial expression and fluid movement of the actors who played the Na'vi characters. For the sequels, Cameron wanted to use the same motion capture tech for actors while they were submerged underwater, an unheard of feat that required years to engineer a solution.

In the end, Cameron and his team succeeded in developing cameras that can record underwater. For post-production improvements utilising artificial intelligence, the director collaborated with visual effects company Weta Digital (best known for their work on the Lord of the Rings films). 

A year before the movie's release, Cameron told Entertainment Weekly, "My colleagues within the production really lobbied heavily for us to do it 'dry for wet,' hanging people on wires." "I declared, 'It won't work. It’s not going to look real.’ I even let them run a test, where we captured dry for wet, and then we captured in water, a crude level of our in-water capture. And even so, it wasn't close.

Filming took three years

Given how long it took to start filming Avatar 2, Cameron made the wise decision to shoot Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 simultaneously. But there were delays in the shooting. Shooting started in 2017 and lasted three years.

Cameron also demanded a lot of his actors. Much of the cast had to film underwater sequences in a 900,000-gallon tank built for the films. Water bubbles and scuba gear interfered with the motion-capture process, so the actors spent months learning to hold their breath for minutes on end. The visual effects-heavy movie required a lot of post-production time (Kate Winslet reportedly set the record on set by holding her breath for more than seven minutes).

It may come as no surprise that the Avatar sequels were extremely expensive to produce. The film "has to be the third or fourth highest-grossing film in history," Cameron told GQ. Your threshold is that. But up until this point, Cameron's movies have always made their money back, despite the fact that he consistently breaks records for producing the most expensive films in history. That is your break even point. Whether he can accomplish the same feat with Way of Water appears to be crucial to the future of the various Avatar sequels.

Source: Time