The Hollywood Reporter broke the news last week that Bong Joon-ho’s cannibalistic science-fiction movie Snowpiercer is being turned into a television series. The script will be written by Josh Friedman, whose listed credits include Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, War of the Worlds, and John Malkovich’s campy pirate drama Crossbones. Weirdly, one title of Friedman’s was not mentioned by THR: Avatar 2. Friedman helped write the screenplay for the sequel to, y’know, the highest-grossing movie of all-time.
No wonder they forget it. So has everyone else.
I attended a midnight screening of Avatar in 2009, with tickets I had purchased months in advance. The hype was massive. It was writer/director James Cameron’s first film since Titanic; the visual effects were rumored to be revolutionary; it was the future of 3-D; it was a “Star Wars for a new generation.” That’s the exact phrasing I heard the morning after it came out from a co-worker who went to a midnight screening with his young son. He wanted his kid to have an experience like he had decades prior, when The Empire Strikes Back raised expectations for big-budget sequels. The thing he and I were both afraid to say at the time was, “Avatar isn’t a good movie.” Yes, it looked amazing, and paying the extra few bucks for 3-D glasses was totally worth it. (I’ve only said this for one other film: Coraline.) But it’s a hollow spectacle, with an absurd plot and insipid characters.
It also made a lot of money.
Despite its nearly three-hour running time (which means theaters couldn’t pack in as many daily screenings), Avatar made $2.79 billion at the box office. It set numerous records, some more impressive (the film opened at #1 in every one of its 106 markets; same for week two) than others (highest-grossing paraplegic-themed film). It was a commercial sensation of the sort not seen since Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, and even that barely cracked a billion. Less than a month after Avatar‘s release, James Cameron was already discussing sequels, telling MTV, “I have a trilogy-scaled arc of story right now, but I haven’t really put any serious work into writing a script.”
That was almost six years ago. Since then, we’ve heard about the “blatant anti-military and less blatant anti-American” backlash, crotch-tear discounts, theme parks, fan-fiction forums, and occasionally, some actual news.
A brief rundown of everything we know about the sequels.
-They’ll take place in a “different setting within Pandora.”
– The original plan was for the sequels, which are being shot simultaneously, to be released beginning in December 2014. Oops.
–Don’t call it a trilogy. “We’re shooting two films back-to-back, so I’m writing two scripts, not one, which will complete a [three]-film story arc – not really a trilogy, but just an overall character arc,” Cameron said.
-That was the original plan. Now it’s three movies, the last of which will “[go] back to the early expeditions of Pandora, and kind of what went wrong with the humans and the Na’vi and what that was like to be an explorer and living in that world.” And they’ll create an “immersive digital experience.”
-There will be underwater scenes.
–Some clarification from composer James Horner, who died earlier this year: “Right now, Jim has got four sequels, script-wise, and he’s trying to make it into three. And that’s where his effort is going, right now, to keep it to three sequels. Because he’s got so much going on. How do you keep it from expanding into [a] fifth movie, I guess, total? He’ll get that sorted out.”
-Zoe Saldana and Sam Worthington are returning. Their characters, Neytiri and Jake Sully, will have children. Sigourney Weaver shows up again, too.
-Arnold Schwarzenegger might be involved.
-Stephen Lang, who played the villainous Col. Miles Quaritch, is Avatar‘s Darth Vader. But didn’t he…? Yes, he did. “Steven was so memorable in the first film, we’re privileged to have him back,” Cameron said. “I’m not going to say exactly how we’re bringing him back, but it’s a science-fiction story, after all.”
-The sequels are being shot in New Zealand, with Avatar 2 coming out in 2017, no, really, Cameron swears. It’s taking so long because “Cameron said he thought it was important that each film linked forward to the next one in a satisfying way but also came to a resolution so that the audience wasn’t left hanging.” But don’t worry: You’ll sh*t yourself with your mouth wide open.
You’ll notice there’s nothing about actual plot details, which is pretty impressive. So much about Star Wars: The Force Awakens was known months before the first trailer came out — meanwhile, with Avatar, we have no idea what to expect. Either no one cares, or more likely, finding a mole in the James Cameron camp is tougher than watching the other Avatar movie.
Right now, the plan is for Avatar 2 (written by Friedman) to open on December 25, 2017, then Avatar 3 (written by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver) and Avatar 4 (written by Shane Salerno) in 2018 and 2019, respectively. But 20th Century Fox chairman-CEO Jim Gianopulos has said Cameron “has his own pace.” (He’s also described the director’s office as being “covered floor to ceiling with images, characters, worlds, settings,” which sounds like actual madness.)
Either way, hopefully the movies will be more memorable than the wait.
