Break out the blue body paint and brush up on your Na’vi, because James Cameron has finished principal shooting on two of his long-awaited Avatar sequels. Cameron has been beavering away at a top-secret location in the Mariana Trench or somewhere, shooting four sequels, the first of which will be largely set underwater. He’s got the old crew back together: Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldana, Sam Whatsisname, plus his Titanic survivor Kate Winslet, who’s apparently learned to hold her breath for more than three minutes.
We will have to hold ours quite a bit longer: Avatar 2 won’t be in cinemas until December 2020 at the earliest. By that time, will anybody care? A lot has happened in the near-decade since the first Avatar. Like pretty much the entire Marvel movie cycle, not to mention the revamped Star Wars saga. These movies captured the popular imagination in ways that Avatar never did. And there’s the box office, too: The Force Awakens actually beat Avatar’s all-time record at the US box office, although Avatar remains the highest-grossing movie internationally in history.
Avatar made a big splash in 2009, genuinely changing the game with its lavishly designed world of wonders. But the ripples have dissipated. Those technological marvels were harnessed in service of a story that now looks like a compendium of cliches, not least the old “Dances With Wolves” trope of the superior white man whom the natives come to revere as their leader. And please remind us why all those blue-skinned Na’vi needed to be played by actors of colour?
The boom in 3D movies that Avatar kicked off is fading away, along with Sam Worthington’s viability as a leading man. If there are still legions of Avatar fans out there, they must be hiding in Na’vi-language chatrooms. If it wasn’t for all the rumour and speculation about sequels, we would probably have forgotten all about Avatar.
But if there is one unwritten rule of cinema, it’s “never bet against James Cameron”. While there is every chance the new Avatars could be as hokey as the Matrix sequels, let’s not forget Cameron has already directed two of the greatest sequels ever made: Terminator 2 and Aliens. Or that predictions of doom are part of the Cameron process. Everyone was sure that Titanic, the most expensive movie of the 20th century, would go the same way as the ship itself. Instead, it made Cameron “king of the world”. Avatar took another 11 years to make, and again, it was a huge, expensive gamble that paid off. Each time, the stakes get higher. The Avatar sequels are a quadrupling down, if you like. Their budget is over $1bn – making them, again, the “most expensive movies” ever made. Once again, Avatar could be the greatest triumph or disaster in movie history. That seems to be the way Cameron likes it. As for the rest of us … let’s see.
