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James Cameron Announces Four Sequels to 'Avatar' (egyptindependent.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In a surprise appearance at CinemaCon, James Cameron announced plans for "a truly massive cinematic process" -- four new sequels to his 2009 blockbuster Avatar, plus a Disney theme park. "It's going to be a true epic saga," Cameron told the audience, promising that Avatar 2 would be released in Christmas of 2018, followed by three additional sequels, for a total of five Avatar-themed movies. Cameron's original sci-fi blockbuster earned $2.8 billion, though at least one Slashdot user argued that its overall message was that technology is bad, "strange because the movie is among most technically sophisticated ever."
Cameron is.
Just need to put the na'vi in the next four biggest trees and you're set
I hope the sequels have some level of originality.
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5460954/the-complete-list-of-sources-avatars-accused-of-ripping-off
The movie showed the same sort of conservation BS that started modern conservativism.
it is the way of their kind
I mean the Movie was a little bit stupid and only focused on effects, but one could bear to watch it. The important question is if the next 4 have an actual story..... (i guess not...)
The Republicans in my town want to tear down an out of date power plant and build 50 acres of condos. Fortunately the people voted that down.
So does he have another gimmick effect to carry the movies like the first turd?
Redondo Beach? It's sad they want to allow the power company to sell the land instead of forcing them to close and tear down the plant. That land needs to be made into a park. The traffic here is already horrible.
And then all of Slashdot argued against him ... Seriously, what authority does one slashdotter have?
https://entertainment.slashdot...
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
"Avatar" basically tells the story of the invasion of America by western europeans. By painting it in modern, but crude and realistic colors, it shows how bad it was. By inventing an unrealistic happy ending, it attempts to reverse the course of the history - in memories. Maybe it makes it a good cure. Anyway, in this perspective what can be the follow-up ? Rewritings of other bad memories of occidentals, such as the the Vietnam war, the colonisation of Palestine, or of the opium wars.
There are announcements about sequels (better batteries) but we are never seeing anything in the cinemas (quadcopter stores). I will believe it when I see it, although I am looking forward to both.
For real; what kind of fool is against deforestation, anyway??
James Cameron is one of my favorite directors.
The sequal to The Terminator and Alien are the best sequels out there IMHO.
He managed to create really good sequels in a time where sequels where only made to sell lunchboxes and stuff.
It's sad that they want to allow a corporation to sell their land instead of forcing them to make it a park.
Followed by Avatar: the desolation of Smaug; Avatar: the worst airbender; and Avatar: the history of the world part II.
It's not like we didn't know the Na'vi and Jar Jar descended from the same ancient ape. Couldn't we have a couple of more authentic Terminator sequels instead?
Can't wait for The Avatar Before Time 12.
His ears are blocked by BILLIONS OF DOLLARS.
Well he engages in a kind-of noble savage fallacy + the obviously retarded "greed (business) is evil". Of course it's OK for James Cameron to hold these views since he has a private jet, 4 houses, a couple of yachts and his own helicopter. The rest of us, no, we're not allowed to cut down trees. My own personal opinion on this is we shouldn't, but that's not the point here. Anyway it's OK if James Cameron wants to build a 5th holiday home. It's just the usual tedious hypocrisy we get from people in the movies.
It was simply a "cowboy and Indian" movie, a genre plumbed deeply in the 50s and 60s, so there is no end to the plots that will be retold about the blue men instead of teh red men.
Just think... Avatar, one film that had such huge cultural impact across the globe, will have four more instalments. The cultural impact from these will be phenomenal and directly affect the cinema going public for a generation. It will shape minds and hearts.
Did I say cultural impact? I meant to say box office earnings. Easy to confuse the two.
Saying this before the fact of it reminds me of the hype machine from the Star Wars prequels. The coincident announcement of a Disney theme park doesn't help.
It's just the usual tedious hypocrisy we get from people in the movies.
The messenger being a hypocritical in no way invalidates the message.
being a hypocritical
Thank you, autocorrect...
He should make 4 sequels to Titanic, also. I know that the boat sank at the end of the first movie, but a good screenwriter can always work around things like that.
I have low expectations for the 4 sequels.
Don't thank auto-correct, thank the US public education system.
Now that Pocahontas has been done to death, I fully expect the sequels to be: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Cinderella... but with blue people.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
On the other hand I haven't heard James Cameron applying for the role of Michael Moore. Maybe he just thought it'd be a good story, the way most movies are just entertainment? It's not hypocracy to make James Bond and still think sending out people with "license to kill" is a bad idea in the real world...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
they're gonna ruin it. Kinda like polishing a turd. Seriously, WTF ever happened to making just *one* movie on a particular subject?
Preview is your fiend.
Say it ain't so!
The one visual slasher effect movie ws QUITE enough!
Well, it doesn't need to, it's just the icing on the cake.
But it is very interesting if the people who espouse the views aren't doing it because they actually inform their own behavior, as it points to there being other reasons why they actually believe that, namely moral signalling.
The Republicans in my town want to tear down an out of date power plant and build 50 acres of condos. Fortunately the people voted that down.
Why is that fortunate? People need someplace to live, and high density condos are better than the alternative of suburban sprawl.
The plot of 'Avatar': A technologically superior society wages war on a society of subsistence farmers in the name of corporate greed and stealing land from its owners. Sound familiar? (IE. The USA in the first-third of the 20th century.)
If the backward society had blimps instead of giant birds, would that make them evil too? Besides,the backward society controlled large animals like drones when the war started. The backward society had technology; that technology just looked like large animals.
Well he engages in a kind-of noble savage fallacy
A more nuanced primitive society with some nasty bits would be a more interesting movie, though that lack of subtlety is probably part of why it made so much money (while being completely unmemorable). People disparage blockbusters for a reason.
+ the obviously retarded "greed (business) is evil". Of course it's OK for James Cameron to hold these views since he has a private jet, 4 houses, a couple of yachts and his own helicopter. The rest of us, no, we're not allowed to cut down trees. My own personal opinion on this is we shouldn't, but that's not the point here. Anyway it's OK if James Cameron wants to build a 5th holiday home. It's just the usual tedious hypocrisy we get from people in the movies.
It's only hypocritical if Cameron made his money strip mining a jungle.
He wasn't arguing for socialism. He was arguing against exploitation, environmental devastation, and destructive corporate greed.
There's nothing in the movie to argue against rich people in general.
I stole this Sig
except when you use it to make a movie.... about how technology is bad.
J
It's no surprise that Avatar's overall message is that "technology is bad" because American Science Fiction's overall message is exactly that.
American SF almost always (that is, with very few exceptions) has an underlying message that technology or science is bad and/or leads to disastrous consequences, or that "man should not meddle with things he is not meant to understand", or that the "power of love" or human emotion in general is vastly superior and/or preferable to technology.
And it's never acknowledged that human emotions are essentially just chemicals operating within and on the brain. In fact, it's always the reverse message, either explicitly or implicitly, that emotions are some mystical non-matieral thing completely disconnected from (and superior to) physical reality.
In short: insipid anti-science, pro-ignorance religious/mystical propaganda, usually with either heavy-handedly overt biblical themes or bland new-age mysticism.
American authors/tv-writers/movie-makers etc also have an extremely hard time distinguising between SF and Fantasy, with "psychic powers" being magic dressed up in pseudo-science to sound all sciency.
It would be more accurate to call it Anti-Science Fiction.
It seems Cameron and the suits have failed to realize that the reason the first Avatar movie made so much money is because it was a spectacle. For many people (myself included) it was the first 3D movie they saw at a movie theater because it was billed as being specifically designed for 3D and not done in post - that plus the hype involved in the special effects kinda helped draw in the numbers. In the end though, it was a demo for the tech. It wasn't a bad movie, but wasn't particularly good either. It just... was. A blockbuster movie you'd watch once and then move on, at least for most people
It has been observed that although Avatar was a massive success, it has almost zero fan base today. No cultural impact. It ain't Star Wars that's for sure, and I strongly doubt that most people would care much to see the next bunch of movies.
I look forward to Avatar 2, where the natives discover they can sell Unobtanium for huge prices, and strip mine the planet themselves as they grow more and more addicted to the income.
Then in Avatar 3 they discover the internet, and being literally naturally designed to jack into things every one of them is an epic hacker fighting for control over a wire transfer a reseller is withholding.
Avatar 4 is not quite as good, being a police procedural set under the now armored and smoke-filled limbs of the World Tree with lots of nods to replicants in Blade Runner, but Avatar 5 looks to be awesome - the long awaited Alien Vs. Predator Vs. Avatar.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
FTFY
No, thanks.
Avatar was enjoyable enough as optical stimuli but its simplistic moral landscape limited it to not much more than that.
I would have been more compelling if there had been more moral complexity than white Earth men come and abuse gentle and innocent indigenous people in order to extract their minerals.
It reduced both sides to a ridiculous caricature of good versus evil and drained it of any interest.
More compelling would have been some kind of desperate reason for Earth men to be there (some kind of end-of-civilization crisis on Earth) and if the indigenous people had been more complex than they are.
I'm not sure any population ever has been all good, shiny and happy like those blue people. How about internal factions with their own vicious conflict?
But so exhausting.
I'm sorry, "greed is evil" is obviously retarded? So obvious that you don't even need to defend that? Sure. Fine. Let's skip that, the comment was about deforestation anyway, not greed.
The noble savage isn't a fallacy, it's a romantic ideal. I suppose that you're trying to refer to the naturalistic fallacy, which supposes that something is good or right simply because that's how it is in nature and with no other justification. The thing is, the bulk of the movie is devoted to convincing the audience that the natural way on Pandora is good and worth defending on its merits, not simply for being natural. So... I don't know where you're going with that comment. Is that just another rant against the 1%ers? Just 'cause they're rich doesn't mean they're wrong all the time.
April First was a few weeks ago...
I wonder if they'll fast-forward 80 years and have the sequel begin with the Na'vi opening up casinos on their reservations...
Guess The Little Mermaid is next.
"The noble savage isn't a fallacy, it's a romantic ideal."
Only it is not an ideal the type of "that's what we should aspire to" but in "that's the way things used to be and we should learn from" and, since things didn't use to be that way, the noble savage *is* a fallacy -or a myth, if so you prefer.
Which is why i almost never use it (as evidenced by the quality of my posts lol)
Yes, Avatar was a big hit, a technical breakthrough, but IMO the time window as passed.
9 years for a sequel to Avatar is a bit too much, I doubt it that Avatar 2 will be anywhere close to Avatar in terms of success. Maybe one sequel would be interesting and work out somehow, but 4? Yeah that's some cow-milking right there, except the cow already went home.
The reason why big franchises like Star Wars, the MCU or even Fast and the Furious keeps drawing people in is because we are invested in the characters, in the stories, in those universes. That could have happened to Avatar, the potential was there, but the time passed, people moved on, there was nothing there for 9 years to sustain the "love". Cameron trying to jump-start a "true epic saga" with 4 sequels to a movie 7 years old is more or less the same as DC trying to catch-up with 8 years of MCU movies with just one single film. You can't compensate for a gap of 8 years and at least 12 movies with 1 single movie, and you can't create an "true epic saga" by creating 4 sequels to a movie who's flame has notoriously faded away.
So Avatar will have 4 sequels? Who really cares these days?
"A sysadmin is a cross between a detective, a police officer, a gardener, a doctor and a fireman"
for taking gfx to the next level.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
As someone else pointed out the msg of Avatar isn't anti technology but more opposed to the kind of neofeudal corporatism that we're all headed into, where the nation state operates at the behest and at the interests of the major multi-nationals. It's interesting seeing a similar msg coming through in such as Mr. Robot and Continuum.
Sorry to have to point this out to you, but asians are just as vilified as white people these days by all of the fashionable reverse-racists.
Oh but it does.
It is the same stick conservatives are beaten with (and rightfully so) when they pander family values while being on their 5th marriage. Physician heal thy self.
I have a disdain for media that are that obvious in their message. The other aspect of technology is making things more efficient so there is less environmental impact.
But a nuanced story of societies making tough choices navigating immature tech with unknown long-term consequences is maybe a bit dry for a summer blockbuster.
Disney isn't turning Animal Kingdom into Avatar Land, it's just an addition Animal Kingdom is getting - so it will simply be a land alongside the Himalaya and Africa areas.
In the same spirit Disney Studios park is getting the addition of a Star Wars land (just started building so perhaps 2018 before we'll see that).
I agree with your assessment of Avatar though and I find the value of a whole land around that universe dubious... we'll see how the four movies go though. Perhaps they'll have a Buzz Lightyear style ride in which you are flying a fighter shooting down Navi?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Creating all of those 3D assets must be very expensive, but once you create them, each extra movie could be comparably cheap. I wonder what kind of movies a billion dollars in content creation, and a giant warehouse of GPUs could create. I just hope Cameron can find decent scripts for them.
Perhaps they'll have a Buzz Lightyear style ride in which you are flying a fighter shooting down Navi?
Nah - it will be a ride where you search out and fire Disney IT workers.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Avatar was only slightly better than Waterworld (but probably still in the same league as Ishtar)
Add that to one of the movies to watch after I'm dead
Lazy writing.
Someone needs to hire Cameron to be in charge of sequels to Alien and Aliens. Ridley Scott's first attempt was pathetic.
Most successful movie of all time at the time was a "flop"? I think you don't need to look far to find an ignorant shit.
Learn to love Alaska
And release the blu ray versions of True Lies and The Abyss.
Sending out people with a license to kill and the wits to understand when someone needs to be killed (or not) is way better than invasive surveillance, extraordinary renditions and drone strikes, which incidentally is the whole point of "Spectre".
Umm... Greed is bad...Oh wait, no, "greed is good." Sorry forgot about that one.
It better be, because the first one wasn't. Some of the visuals were impressive, but the story was pretty much... how to say it... like written by a 1st year student. "Here's the standard book on Hollywood stories, add some aliens and VR because that's a hype right now. Also, you have one week."
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Named as such because it's hard to obtainium
White privilege is where specific-skin-color people never need to share. It's a parallel to the rain forest, where a very few "special" people are -- according to shallow, thoughtless cuntservatives -- supposed to be granted a perpetual and infinite right to an extremely vast resource, regardless of the needs of anyone else, with absolutely no compromises.
Oh I don't know. I think it would make an excellent theme for a movie or four.
Here I was hoping that the UK government had come up with a new angle on the EU referendum.
Nos II, II and IV. Personally, I can wait, there are so many 'better' SF films. It's paradoxical (and should be a named law) that a big budget tends to make a bad film. Actually it's probably something to do with the fallacy of composition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
On y va, qui mal y pense!
There's a saying that I will translate from French, to wit: 'Eat shit, 10000000 flies cannot be wrong'. In the same vein, your Mr. Trump is good because he has a lot of cash?
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Thanks for the sentiments but I wasn't actually "educated" in that fashion; i grew up overseas (my first four years of schooling was mostly taught in Japanese... however, my parents read to me avidly until I was four; after that, I took over and began tackling my dad's sci-fi collection (starting with "Revolution in 2100" by Heinlein). No disrespect, AC, but I'll put my literary skills up against anyone else's (nevermind yours!) any day of the week. ;)
It's like Berkeley Systems announcing the future releases of "After Dark II, III, IV and V", due to the success of their first two-hour long screensaver.
Windows 10 is great - I used it to download Linux.
Noooooooooooooo!!!
http://i.cubeupload.com/T6cyLu.png
Tech ain't bad, Cameron is.
No he's not.
He does mass-compatible popcorn movies. They may be not your exact taste (mine neither) but they're not bad.
Point in case: Compare Avatar to the latest Batman vs. Superman. Later is bad movie. Former is not.
Avatar may be a rehash of a generic story with predicable plot - but it is well executed. The SFX in Avatar are top-of-the-line as is the art direction. The acting is mostly ok, with Saldana, Weaver and Ribisi actually being quite good. And while Stephen Lang does play a relatively generic badass bad-guy, I would say he nailed it pretty good - well supported by Camerons narative and shooting. It's definitely fun to watch him - mostly because he's so over-the-top.
It's a balls of fun popcorn movie that won't hurt or overload your brain with big questions about life and existance. No big deal. In terms of mass-compatible pop-corn movies, it's exactly what Cameron was aiming for. Which makes him a fine director, if you ask me. Not the best, not top ten im my book, but good.
My 0.02 Euros.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Caught glimpses, seen bits, but can't be bothered to watch the whole thing, bit's I've seen look great, but subject and story look totally crap.
Can't stand pocahontas story, never mind a crap re-telling with fancy effects.
The new ones will be hyped to the eyeballs and will do well for the people who are shallow and like shiny baubles.
first learn the difference between greed and wealth.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Apparently the announcement only sounds like a good idea if you wear 3D glasses while reading it.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Crap! I just cut down a tree in my yard this weekend.
Am I in trouble, or will the fact that it was a non-native invasive species* save me?
*buckthorn
Quite frankly, I had enough with one serving of Avatar. That movie is, story-wise, little more than Dances with Wolves in space. Special effects are top-notch, but most big-budget movies, special-effects-oriented movies also have top-notch special effects.
You are right. And here you are!!!.
Having stolen the concept (projecting a human mind into an alien body on on alien world) from a 1960's SF short story and picked another remake of a standard plot, the only thing Avatar had going for it was the hot sh*t CGI (oh, and a lot of marketing hype).
Avatar IV: Rocky Home Alone Freeing Willy
That tree was fleeing oppression and persecution. And if it turned up in your garden just because the soil is better, well wouldn't you do the same in its place?
# dum diddle um dum diddle um deeeee ...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
'got the DVD--with a whole batch of scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor.'
Well congrats, then, you probably already own the second movie!
If you can offset what was said why don't you just say it instead of acting like you're aware of something that no one else is? Your post sounds more butthurt than insightful. Is that you, Mr. Cameron?
Corporation/military returns to planet, inhabitants of which have no ability to get into space, nerve gas and carpet bomb the surface from orbit to eradicate the native life, send robotic miners to extract the mineral resources. Fin.
Was I the only one who clicked before remembering that Avatar is NOT 'the Last Air Bender series'... and then got really disappointed?
...over his previous idea for a four parter Titanic series.
I've found that a lot more story development can be accomplished (in the right hands) of a series. In a series you have a longer time to develop characters. 10 episodes @ 45 min each = 450 minutes, which would be a 7.5 hour movie. I don't know if it would apply to this type of movie, that seems to take so much time/resources/money/planning/post-production but I think it would be pretty cool.
I always felt like there was so much more to the Avatar story than what was in the movie. Movies have to be condensed to fit into a ~2.5 hr timeframe, unless you are planning out a sequel. But then it is released years apart.
With the "Netflix model" of a series like an Orange is the New Black, or Daredevil, or any of the others out there where the entire series is released at once it seems like a new style of movie can be released. One where you can take time to develop one or more characters and not have to take shortcuts and cram it in or leave parts on the cutting room floor. While this can happen with regular TV series, I've started to realize that I want the option to watch two or three in a row, or when I want. Waiting to watch Breaking Bad in this manner took a lot of the pressure off. I personally don't like being tied to a schedule to watch TV, and never cared enough to get a DVR.
(I was going to mention the Trailer Park Boys above... but that kind of killed my "character development" argument)
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I was full of it after 20 minutes. Why would someone want more of it?
2011. The year Gnome decided Linux will never be on the desktop.
Technology is Bad was certainly NOT the message. Apparently people don't know what technology is (or is not). The message was that unbridled capitalism is bad particular capitalism in the form of racist imperialism.
You need to figure out what "flop" means.
Learn to love Alaska
The idiot you see is your own reflection.
Learn to love Alaska
Go fuck yourself, troll.
Like I said, what you accuse others of is only you seeing yourself.
Learn to love Alaska
Someone who points out you are an illiterate idiot must like Avatar? Your logic skills are weak. Try thinking before speaking. Scratch that. Try thinking. At least once. You've obviously not tried it yet. It's useful.
Learn to love Alaska
Only took four posts or so to realise what a spacker you are. Point A, you don't know what a 'flop' is.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Except he did boast about being the greenest director of all time and about Avatar sending an environmental message. So no, not Michael Moore (though both make fiction), just James Cameron.
It depends on why you cut down the tree.
A flop is anything I don't like. It is called an opinion. A fucktard like you should know what an opinion is, since you think the world revolves around yours. Thanks for playing.
No, seriously: Why?
I know I'm about to butthurt a whole asston of James Cameron and Avatar fanbois. However the that and 25 still doesn't equal me giving a fuck.So, here it is:
IN MY OPINION the movie was more hype than anything else. Yes it had stunning visuals and was ground breaking on the technology side.
However, strip all that away and you are left with a mediocre performance, blatant rip off story line, and LOLable, implausible outcome.
I could go into detail (like how I could pick scenes that were blatantly obvious it came from another movie verbatim), however I will say this: Now that the shock and awe of the first movie is over, I highly doubt he can pull that kind of success again, let alone do it 4 times.