Avatar 2

James Cameron is the kind of director who likes to revolutionize the industry he works in whenever he makes a movie. Shot entirely in a new format of 3-D motion-capture, his Avatar wowed audiences with its visual style and groundbreaking effects, and Cameron is poised to do it again. He announced today that Avatar 2 will be projected in 3-D, but audiences won’t need their glasses.

By sheer chance, last week I spent five days at Disney World with my son’s high school choir, at the same time that Animal Kingdom officially opened its new “Pandora - The World of Avatar” area. Our group was slated to go to Animal Kingdom on Memorial Day, and I was eager to see how Disney had turned James Cameron’s 2009 prog-rock/science-fiction/eco-propaganda experiment into a real-world habitat. So on the morning before our designated day, I opened up the “My Disney Experience” app on my phone to check out the wait times. About forty minutes after the park opened, the line for the “Na’vi River Journey” ride was already three hours long. And the wait for “Avatar Flight of Passage?” Four hours.

Here’s the first paragraph of an item that ran this morning on Deadline, reproduced in full:

It’s been nearly eight years since James Cameron’s Avatar took the global box office by storm, and while it’s become très chic for some corners of the internet to endlessly bash Avatar, I still maintain my stubborn affection for Cameron’s movie. Very few filmmakers can create action-driven science-fiction that operates at Cameron’s level; just look at how many times people have messed up Cameron’s Terminator franchise, a near-flawless formula for blockbuster movies that studios have nevertheless run directly into the ground. We may laugh at Cameron’s planned sequels, but they are both original (technically!) and creator-driven movies. Isn’t that what we claim to want from Hollywood?

Well, it’s official. Whether the world is prepared for it or not, James Cameron and co. are going to start production on Avatar 2 this fall. Yep, you read that right, the on-again-off-again sequel(s) project will finally start coming to fruition, provided international calamity doesn’t strike our shores in the coming months.

Why is it that James Cameron’s updates about progress on his colossal plotted Avatar franchise always kind of sound like threats? In a brash nose-thumbing to the concept of economic bubbles, James Cameron went all in on his Avatar franchise gambit and decided to produce the next four films in the planned pentalogy concurrently...

Sigourney Weaver is something of a sci-fi movie icon. Since her performance in Alien, she’s made a ton of appearances in all kinds of movies about the weird and the wonderful, from The Cabin in the Woods to WALL-E to a brief but not unwelcome scene in this summer’s Ghostbusters. She was also one of the best parts of James Cameron’s Avatar, playing Dr. Grace Augustine, one of the scientists in the Avatar Program who started a research program to learn more about the planet Pandora and its inhabitants. She’s read the scripts for Cameron’s planned sequels, and, according to her, they’re “amazing.”

Big things are a-happenin’ over at Fox, per The Hollywood Reporter. The studio made a slew of scheduling changes on the night before Thanksgiving as a sort of special edition of a Friday dump. (That term refers to the PR practice of burying bad or otherwise uninteresting news on a Friday afternoon, when coverage will be minimal.) Big-name projects have all been shuffled around, and that’s all fully detailed below, but the most eye-catching item on Fox’s docket happens to be an unnamed project from James Cameron’s production company Lightstorm Entertainment.

The Avatar-industrial complex churns along apace today, with a new peek into Walt Disney World’s forthcoming theme park modeled after James Cameron’s unforgettable — in that we are all constantly reminded of its existence — sci-fi/fantasy blockbuster. Oh My Disney has a crop of new images giving prospective visitors an early eyeful of the various attractions to be enjoyed at what is officially named “Pandora — The World of Avatar.” And it looks like the many devotees of the franchise and its lore have lots to look forward when the park officially opens this summer.

It was just this past April that blockbuster alchemist James Cameron made the promise/threat of four sequels to his massively lucrative sci-fi fantasy Avatar. Having apparently calculated “eight years or so” as the optimal amount of time to let Avatar fever percolate before reaching a boiling point, the filmmaker hinted at plans for his follow-up(s) while accepting his honorary membership into the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers on Friday night. Indiewire reports that while entering an elite group of industry professionals devoted to expanding the technological reach of film, Cameron stated his intentions to bring Avatar even further into the future with groundbreaking techniques and equipment.