With the release of Avatar: The Way of Water coming to the big screen this month I decided to wrap up my “Past, Present and Future” blogs this year with a look at how the Avatar film series started versus how the future is looking. I will admit this could’ve been a short blog due to the fact that there’s been only one film released thus far but there is plenty to talk about, trust me.
So back in 2009 the world was introduced to the epic behemoth of a film with Avatar which filmmaker James Cameron had been working on for a long, long time. After many years of world building and finessing some top tier visual effects Cameron released Avatar in a very risk-heavy market. Superhero films were just taking off again with the launch of the MCU and original storytelling was in a decline, and yet that didn’t stop Avatar from becoming one of the biggest and one of the most successful films of all time! The effects, the characters, the world of Pandora and the immersive 3D all worked in unison and sold us that this was a film that had to be experienced, let alone seen, on the biggest screen possible. James Cameron was truly the king of the world!
Shortly after the release of Avatar there was an announcement of a sequel in the works, which was a no brainer considering the astronomical success of the first film. Funnily enough James Cameron said it won’t take as long to create a sequel and yet here we are, thirteen years later in fact, with the long-anticipated film titled Avatar: The Way of Water. It’s been a long time coming with a constant string of delays, which the pandemic didn’t help with either, and it looks like this film is actually real. A sequel exists and promises to be as huge and as epic as the first film.
Avatar: The Way of Water picks up a long time after the events of the first film with the main characters of Neytiri and Jake Sully having a family. They have a fair few children and the emphasis this time is on them being parents and their responsibility on bringing up their children in a world that is in constant threat of war with the humans. The RDA, which is the company that are mining the resources of the moon of Pandora, are back and they’re coming after the Na’vi yet again. Instead of exploring the skies of Pandora however we are instead taking to the depths of the oceans, which means more aquatic creatures and new colonies of Na’vi with their own oceanic culture. How do the events of the film play out? Well we only have a few weeks to find out.
One of the main reasons why Avatar: The Way of Water has been delayed multiple times is because James Cameron created a writer’s room of talented scriptwriters and together they all crafted an epic story that spans multiple films, with this upcoming film and the third film being filmed back-to-back similar to The Lord of the Rings films. Not only that but there is a fourth and a fifth film in development, which will begin filming soon too, and if these films make enough money we could potentially see a sixth and seventh film too! Although all of this depends on whether Avatar: The Way of Water repeats the success of the first film. In a post-pandemic world it is a risky endeavour to release high-budgeted films, but if Cameron can do it once with Titanic, and again with Avatar, then maybe he can perform a hat-trick with his sequel. Regardless either way, we have plenty more stories in the works and Avatar is one franchise that has a potentially bright future ahead.
Thanks for reading today’s blog!
Alex Murray, the Head of Eyesight Productions
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