James Cameron

Director says films won’t take nearly as long to make now that they have CG technology figured out.

“Aliens.” “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” James Cameron knows how to make a sequel, revisiting fully created fictional worlds, taking what’s already established and trying to outflank what came before. That’s been the director’s plan since embarking on his technology-revolutionizing quest to being “Avatar” to the big screen, and with the film’s mammoth first weekend behind it, an alien love story sequel we almost certainly shall get. (If you haven’t seen the film already, now would be a good time to stop reading, as spoilers abound below).

In a pre-opening discussion with MTV News, Cameron spoke at length about his plans for his burgeoning sci-fi franchise and where the story will pick up following the first film’s game-changer of an ending: Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) successfully and permanently transfers his consciousness to his big blue Na’vi avatar after falling in love with Princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldana).

Cameron made clear that the next film won’t be a prequel, recounting previous backstory, but will begin after the events of the initial movie. “We’ll follow Jake and Neytiri,” he confirmed.

In fact, Cameron intends to follow the couple for another two films. “I have a trilogy-scaled arc of story right now, but I haven’t really put any serious work into writing a script,” he said.

The next two films, however, won’t necessitate the four years of production time that “Avatar” took to perfect its motion-capture technology and computer-generated environments and beings. “Part of what we set out to do is create a world and create these characters,” Cameron said. “From the time we capture and finish the capture, it’s literally nine to 10 months to get the CG characters working, to get their facial musculature working. … So now we have Jake, we have Neytiri. Sam can step right back into it, the characters will fit them like a glove, and we’ll just go on. So a lot of the start-up torque that had to be done for one movie really makes more sense if you play it out across several films.”

So where will the challenge be for a director who so famously craves one, from the intensity of shooting underwater for months for 1989’s “The Abyss” to the mega-budgeted, initially ridiculed “Titanic” in 1997?

“My next goal is to refine the technique, make it easier so it doesn’t take as long,” Cameron said. “We were doing a lot of pioneering work on ‘Avatar.’ It wouldn’t have taken as long if we already knew exactly how to do it.”

Avatar Movie

Back in the day (read: three weeks ago), some people said James Cameron’s weird blue alien movie with its gimmicky 3D effects would flop at the box office. Heck, they had spent so much making this movie and so much marketing it last minute, that there’s no way it would succeed, right? It would never come close to the numbers that Twilight Saga’s New Moon made in November; It wouldn’t even compete against Sherlock Holmes.

Those people were all wrong.

After 17 days, including a December opening weekend record, a record for the largest opening of an original film not based on an existing property (novel, short story) or film (sequel, remake), the biggest second weekend of all time, the biggest third weekend of all time, among many other records, Avatar hit it big amongst critics, fans and the box office; And it’s only the beginning.

Did I mention that it was just 17 days? In 17 days, Avatar has helped James Cameron become the only director ever to have two films cross the $1 billion dollar mark.

Avatar is currently sitting as the 4th highest grossing film of all time, surpassing last year’s The Dark Knight over the weekend. Ahead of it, Cameron’s other money maker in Titanic stands high above the competition in the #1 slot. Between Cameron’s two movies sits Lord of the Rings: Return of the King at #2 and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest at #3 (those are both sequels by the way).

Here’s Box Office Mojo’s chart of the top 5 movies of all time (worldwide):

Again, this is just after 17 days. Avatar will easily surpass ROTK and the disappointing Pirates of the Caribbean sequel for the #2 slot but I don’t think it’ll beat Cameron’s other movie. If that’s not enough, Avatar will also no doubt be the biggest Blu-ray release to date when it comes to home video. Fox was right in investing in Cameron’s return to cinema and giving him all the time he needed to do it right.

It may be impossible to fairly compare box office earnings with different amounts of theaters screens playing the movie, ticket prices, etc., but that doesnt’ take away from the success Avatar has earned thus far.

On that note, we should point out that the 3D and IMAX tickets cost more, which are helping the box office take, but there aren’t nearly as many 3D capable screens out there compared to standard format yet. The movie itself is what has kept it consistently making big numbers day after day and three weekends straight. Not many movies have ever had such strong word-of-mouth as this and at my workplace, folks who don’t usually see many films in theaters have made the effort to see this and have come back with praise (and that’s of the 2D version).

I believed Avatar would do well (and debated before, during and after the film’s release about it), but I never expected numbers such as this. If you’re still wondering whether or not to see Avatar (or see it again), here’s a snippet from my last discussion of Avatar’s record-breaking numbers after its opening weekend:

Avatar is one of the greatest theater-viewing experiences I’ve ever had and something that I needed to see twice to fully appreciate. While some say the story is bland or character development isn’t as strong as could be, don’t buy into that. There’s as good a story and characters here than any other film of 2009 (and I watched quite a few movies) and if there is one movie I had to recommend people go see on the big screen more than any other, James Cameron’s Avatar is it.

There is no doubt more of a push on those discussions of an Avatar sequel and I’m excited to see what Cameron will bring next. I expect he’ll take a different direction entirely as we saw with Aliens and Terminator 2 compared to their predecessors, but that won’t be happening just yet; James Cameron has other projects on his plate first.

What do you think of Avatar’s success, and just how far will it go?

Avatar Poster

Avatar is a 2009 American science fiction film written and directed by James Cameron, and starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang. The film is set in the year 2154 on Pandora, a fictional inhabited Earth-like moon in a distant planetary system. Humans are engaged in mining Pandora’s reserves of a precious mineral, while the Na’vi — the sapient race of humanoids indigenous to the moon — resist the colonists’ expansion, which threatens the continued existence of the Na’vi and the Pandoran ecosystem. The film’s title refers to the remotely controlled, genetically engineered human-Na’vi bodies used by the film’s human characters to interact with the natives.

Avatar had been in development since 1994 by Cameron, who wrote a 114-page scriptment for the film. Filming was supposed to take place after the completion of Titanic, and the film would have been released in 1999, but according to Cameron, “technology needed to catch up” with his vision of the film. In early 2006, Cameron developed the script, the language, and the culture of Pandora. He has stated that if Avatar is successful, two sequels to the film are planned.

The film was released in traditional 2-D and 3-D formats, along with an IMAX 3D release in selected theaters. Avatar is officially budgeted at $237 million; other estimates put the cost at $280 – $310 million to produce and an estimated $150 million for marketing. The film is being touted as a breakthrough in terms of filmmaking technology, for its development of 3D viewing and stereoscopic filmmaking with cameras that were specially designed for the film’s production. Opening to critical acclaim, it grossed an estimated $27 million on its opening day and made $77,025,481 in the United States and Canada on its opening weekend.Worldwide, the film grossed an estimated $232,180,000 on its opening weekend, the ninth-largest opening-weekend gross of all time, and the largest for a non-franchise, non-sequel and original film.

Here is another interesting article:

The James “Titanic” Cameron blockbuster, Avatar, has just arrived in cinemas and continues the director’s preference for epic stories on a grand scale. If you’ve missed the trailers, the story is about a disabled US marine called Jake Sully who takes on a new alien form in order to be able to infiltrate the alien planet Pandora, populated by the Na’vi.