Amph James Cameron's Avatar (The Way of Water + sequels)

I'm sure Cameron will come up with some sort of inventive envelope pushing technological innovation (since he has done it in every movie since, well, The Abyss) that'll rack up the coin and visual pizzaz for Avatar 2.

Will that last all the way to Avatar 5? Erm... maybe not. But I think people will go gaga, and rightfully so, for whatever Cameron has up his sleeve for Avatar 2.

And I do also expect the numbering to drop and for it to go full subtitle instead. And I think Cameron is smart enough to make each movie thematically and stylistically different from each other. Terminator 2 is one of the best damn sequels ever for many reasons, one of which is it smartly flips around the first movie. Aliens is also a genius flip of Alien as well. The guy knows to bust out structural tricks in his sequels.

Anyway, as said often before, people have been predicting Cameron has been going to bomb every movie since, I dunno, True Lies or so and he refuses to tank so I kind of doubt he's gonna suddenly strike out now.

 

BigAl6ft6, apparently that's the idea. All the movies will fit together into a coherent story, but they're all designed that a person watching Avatar 5 for the first time can understand what's going on without needing to have seen the previous four films, although that always helps in a long-running series, especially one as big and sprawling as the Avatar sequels are likely to be. As for Cameron flaming out, I couldn't agree more. People have been predicting that his next film is going to bomb and ruin him at least as far back as Titanic. His last two mainstream films, Titanic and Avatar made a combined four billion dollars, and that's on top of Titanic's 11 Oscars, which means that any studio he approaches with an idea is automatically going to yes and let him do pretty much whatever he wants.

EDIT: And apparently one of the tricks that he has up his sleeve is shooting the movies with HFR cameras. Given that Jim Cameron, is notorious for being a technical perfectionist, I don't find it hard to imagine that he's learned lessons from Peter Jackson's use of HFR techniques on The Hobbit, but at the same time I wasn't really a fan of that decision in regards to The Hobbit, as parts of AUJ looked like they were on fast forward and parts of TDOS either really low res or just really, really fake.

 

Total made up theory, Cameron realizes that the rights to Terminator will revert back to him by 2023 so he's making the 5th movie basically Avatar vs. Terminator.

 

Yeah, as I said, Cameron is notorious for being a perfectionist, so I don't think he'd shoot in HFR unless he could make it work and I don't find it that hard to imagine that he'll find a way to do something really creative with it, but at the same time, HFR probably should have been tried out on some smaller movies first, because it did make The Hobbit look really uneven in places, which I think it why it hasn't caught on.

 

I thought the Hobbit looked incredible with HFR, despite some up close shots where it made it look sped up. The Goblin chase was amazing in HFR.

I thought a number of jungle shots in Avatar looked great in 3d, I would not mind seeing it in HFR.

 

I'd watch it.

 

I'd like to see Predators go hunting on Pandora.

 

I think Fox might be a potentially over invested in this now that we know that they are filming this simultaneously. I don't doubt they'll be good films, however the second one isn't a garenteed success (at least not as mcuh as the first one). I guess they hope their worse case scenario is Transformers-like success.

 

I rewatched it recently. The movie does have a very "animated" finish to it. If they can detail things up, with a high frame rate, that'll be interesting. I hope James produces an Oculus VR episode. That somehow seems like a logical progression.

 

With four movies I'm wondering if Cameron will be able to keep each installment under the two and a half hour mark he hasn't been able to hit since .... erm, The Terminator? (Taking into account director's cuts here, pretty sure every movie past Terminator has been about two and half hours at least)

 

I think I'd be disappointed in a merely 2 hour movie.

4 movies isn't so shocking. Every good, and meh, franchise does it now. Trilogies aren't enough anymore. Blame it on Harry Potter.

 

James Cameron finally gives a brief hint of the plot of Avatars 2-3

https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/3a0cae82-391a-3450-876e-6eb2959f2e4a/ss_'avatar-2'-plot:.html

But... it's almost word-for-word how people describe Star Wars... generations and family issues, and nature versus humans.


Which is a big thing and all, and of course it can be done fantastically (hence these boards)... but the big problem with Avatar 1 was the simple and unoriginal way it handled its characters and plot.

Maybe this is being a little pessimistic. Maybe his plan will make it so we are more invested in the characters and plot and this is the way to do that. Maybe the characters/plot will also have a creative spin and take some risks. Maybe.

I think a more exciting path to take would be to build on Avatar 1's strength, and organically use its strength to improve its weakness. Its strength was setting/world-building. Be creative with that again, lead with that, and see what interesting characters can come organically from the setting/worldbuilding, and the interesting plots that could come organically from those characters. For example, the way they domesticate animals, can communicate with plants, and even store their memories and perhaps consciousness in those special trees (and now Grace may have basically done the equivalent of uploading her soul into the organic planetary supercomputer). I'm sure they could add to that foundational stuff and become even more creative.

But simply saying it will be about families and generations and trees versus humans? Yea, we'll see. There's already been a variety of those stories, and Avatar is trying to fit in with the best of them, but hasn't, and this just might highlight their weakness even more instead.

 

Wait, people think Avatar was good enough to warrant sequels? Yeah, no. No thanks. NOPE.

 

Oh. You're one of them.

 

i feel like if we had gotten a sequel, like, four years ago, i might have been on board but at this point im like "wtf that old movie? isnt it due for a reboot at this point?"

 

With the approaching decade long gap in between part 1 & 2, I'm wagering JakeSully has set up a whole family by now and then stuff happens. T2 and Aliens are, at their core, kind of movies about family. Basically, Cameron does two types of movies, once you strip away the scope, that have a similar character base: two lovers from worlds apart (Terminator, Abyss, Titanic, Avatar) or family dramas (Aliens, True Lies, T2).

Speaking of Avatar, I saw that "Avatar: Toruk: First Flight" Cirque de Solei show a few months ago and I really dug it. No humans in it and, aside from the narrator the dialogue from the performers is all in Na'vi which is kind of wild, but it's a pretty nifty visual marvel as they literally have the giant flying beast and the spirit floating tree, etc. Pretty fun. In this interview (where the above quotes are sourced from) he talks about the show, saying "But thematically, ‘Toruk’ manages to land very very closely to the feeling of where the sequel stories are going.” And the story of Toruk is less of the stranger in a strange land that Avatar was and more about hunters going on a hero's journey and fighting an insurmountable odds against the wild to save the day and becoming their own person out of it.

 

There really is no need to only jump 10 years into the future. They can go 20 years since Sully will be CG.