"Avatar" Sequels Delayed...does anybody care?

[bigdaddy]

*types "Avatar cosplay" into google images"

Well, I certainly see a lot of people cosplaying as Na'vi. Mostly women it seems. Covered in bodypaint. And not much else.
I'm actually surprised as I rather expected most of the results to be The Last Airbender related, but they seem to be in the minority... Scratch that; I'm not surprised at all.

I don't know, I see a ton of Last Airbender myself.

This one being my favorite. :-D

 

[Reverend]

Oh I saw plenty of Airbender stuff, it's just that the space smurf crowd seemed to outnumber the shaolin chibis by about two or three to one.

For the record, my favourite was the really buff dude cosplaying as the Ember Island player version of Toph.

 

[JD]

To address the OP directly, I do care that the film(s) is/are going to be delayed. I am getting older, and I do not want to be pushing 80 when some of the last ones will be finished. Technology is advancing, warp speed, and I am sad that I have limited time left to witness the wonders!

(Derail: ...for the Love of All That is Holy, will Somebody puhleeeeeeze hurry up and make "Ringworld"!)

Syfy announced in 2013 that they were working on a miniseries, but it doesn't look like much has been said since then, so I don't know if it's still being worked on.

No, it's that comparison I was referring to and I'm saying that it's silliness. Avatar was a profitable, highly-praised powerhouse with a small cohort of dissenters whose noise level is out of proportion to their apparent impact on anything quantifiable. The Fantastic Four films are universally panned failures by virtually any metric. If you see anything comparable in their "recent online commentary" I respectfully submit you are kidding yourself.

I don't know if I'd say all of the FF films were "universally paned", there seemed to be a few people on here who liked the first one.

How did Avatar spawn anything except a bunch of 3D movies? A subcultural phenomenon? Where? I don't see cosplayers dressing up as Avatar characters, I don't see a siginificant amount of fan fiction or art and the only talk on the internet I do see about is is usually negative.
You are right, many great films have detractors who didn't like it and will make that known but that doesn't make the fans disappear. Well, where are the Avatar fans?
What did you like about Avatar? What made it a great movie? No one's arguing that it wasn't incredibly successful financially and it influenced the industry but what made it a great movie and deserving of FOUR sequels? It hasn't even proven that it has legs as a franchise, what if people don't come back for the sequel? Then they're stuck with three more.
While it's true that people being worried and Cameron proving them wrong has happened several times before there will be the one movie where he falls flat on his face and it really could be this time because it feels like he's out of control, how long has he been writing and expanding and tinkering with the script and developing technology? At some point you have to actually start filming and that point was seberal years ago.


People said that about Batman v Superman, it didn't happen.

Only film I know of to have ever spawned its own psychological disorder. I wouldn't rank its fan community with SW or Trek in terms of fanaticism just yet, but you can believe there are people out there learning Na'Vi and cosplaying blue cat-elves as we speak, and that their ranks will multiply massively when the sequels come out.

I'm not one of those people, but I can see the appeal. It has a well-realized and thought-through world (my inner nutty geek loves that part), and besides that, the anti-Avatar brigade's constant, nigh-on-desperate attempts to talk down the story seem very silly and pointless to me: it's a perfectly cromulent rendering of the kind of white-man-goes-native storyline western civilization has been telling for centuries, it has great action, fun characters, I don't really see what's not to like.

Those stories are 5 and 6 years old, do you have anything more recent?
Avatar strikes me as something that was a big deal when it came out, but didn't really sustain that awareness over time.

 

[BigJake]

I don't know if I'd say all of the FF films were "universally paned",

"Universally" obviously being a bit of a term of art, there, since clearly there is no film that absolutely 100% of people hate. I'm sure there are a few people who like Uwe Boll movies or think Guccione's Caligula is underrated.

Avatar strikes me as something that was a big deal when it came out, but didn't really sustain that awareness over time.

In general I think it's fair to say that activity dropped off after the first movie but that should not be a surprise; really sustained fandoms with their own conventions and such come out of properties that have had more than one outing. So demanding to see an established Avatar fandom on something like the Star Wars scale as proof that anyone liked the movie seems pointless and wrong-headed to me. (But yes, there is an Avatar fandom still active on the Net. The third link there is from a few months ago, for instance. If you're really keen to find out about the current state of that fandom, I'm quite sure it will have its own BBS somewhere.)

 

[Mr Light]

The only thing I've heard about the sequels is one takes place on a moon and one takes place underwater.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

I don't know. I don't get either the affection from the 'genre' community common to major works and franchises, or immediate cultural awareness among casual cinema goers. It's kind of 'Avatar ? Oh, I remember that.'

Agreed. It seems like the only time you actually see any hardcore Avatar fans come out of the woodwork is when someone starts a thread like this asking where all the Avatar fans are.

I think that, from time to time, the people of the world just go absolutely insane and flock to a mediocre movie, drastically inflating its box office beyond all reason. We keep seeing it again & again with all of those goddamn Transformers movies. And there have been some other movies that have made enough money to get a sequel even though I don't think you'll find an awful lot of people who particularly liked the first one-- Clash of the Titans (2010), Snow White & the Huntsman, Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, just to name a few.

Yes, Avatar made a lot of money. But money alone is not always an indicator of quality. Remember, domestically, the highest grossing X-Men movie is X-Men: The Last Stand. (I don't count Deadpool as an X-Men movie, but even so.) And I can't think of anyone who has ever said that X-Men: The Last Stand is their favorite X-Men movie.

it's a perfectly cromulent rendering of the kind of white-man-goes-native story-line

Can I just take a moment to applaud you for using "cromulent" in a sentence. You have perfectly embiggened the themes James Cameron intended!

 

[Kai "the spy"]

Agreed. It seems like the only time you actually see any hardcore Avatar fans come out of the woodwork is when someone starts a thread like this asking where all the Avatar fans are.

Well, what do you expect?! There's only the one movie right now, so there's very little to talk about.

At least on a Trek message board. Out there in the internet, there are message boards, fan-made fake trailers, Wikis, fan fiction and fan art.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

I dunno. David Lynch only made the one Dune movie but it still seems to have a larger cult appeal than Avatar, particularly when you consider that Avatar made $750 million while Dune only made $31 million.

 

[Kai "the spy"]

So, hang on, before you doubted there were actually active fans at all, which I've disproven, so now the argument is "there are less hardcore fans of X than of Y"?!

Cult followings mostly develop over smaller movies, often enough hardcore followings develop because of the need to find oneself's identity (I like this, which most people around me don't care about, but I do, so this is me, and maybe I'll find others like me). "Avatar" was simply too popular when it came out, so "I like it" wasn't really a way to single yourself out.

You don't like it, though, that's the way to differentiate yourself from the masses. This is how the hatred for something popular even comes about. Normally, when you don't like a movie/TV show/musician, you just go on and don't care, but if said movie/TV show/musician is very popular/successful, and people like it and talk about it, you start arguing against it. Usually by saying how stupid it/he/she is, and people are just dumb for liking it/him/her.

So, the question is, if you don't like it, why do you care?

 

[dahj]

I dunno. David Lynch only made the one Dune movie but it still seems to have a larger cult appeal than Avatar

To be fair, Dune had a strong following prior to the movie...

 

[mos6507]

I think Avatar was more of a proof of concept than a carefully choreographed rollout of a new multi-film franchise. The sequels are really more of the true franchise launch in how they're all being planned and paced out over years. I think JC knows this which is why he's raising the bar for himself and pushing back ETAs. The only multi-film franchise where he did two or more of them was Terminator and after the second he felt that was the end of the story. This is new territory for him.

 

[theenglish]

I agree that Dune is an unfair comparison--it was huge in the seventies before Lynch's movie was released. You might as well say people like Lord of the Rings because of the movies.

 

[Enterprise is Great]

Fear The Walking Dead’s Cliff Curtis Signs On For Lead Role

He's signed on for all 4 sequels!

 

[Vger23]

Yes, I care tremendously. Mainly because I am thrilled that the reality of more stupid Avatar movies seems more and more unlikely with each delay.

 

[ichab]

I honestly don't care as I never liked the movie, but numbers don't lie. A lot of people DID like it and I'm sure when the sequal does hit the theaters people will come out in droves to see it. I just won't be one of them.

We also have to remember that quality is completely subjective. One man's piece of garbage is another man's pot of gold.

 

[Gaith]

Fear The Walking Dead’s Cliff Curtis Signs On For Lead Role

He's signed on for all 4 sequels!

Hey, I know that guy! And by "know", I mean that I was a paid extra on a shoot of his short-lived NBC series Trauma:

That's moi, front and center, looking and whooping right at him.​

NBD.

 

[Mudd]

I care. I'm vastly more engaged by Avatar than by big-budget superhero shit (unless it's intentionally funny, like Deadpool and GoTG) or zombified old skiffy franchises like the revived Star Wars.

Based on box office over the last eight years that remains true for the international film-going audience.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

I saw Zoe Saldana last week on Bravo's Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, that aired on May 4, 2017, and she seemed to believe the sequels were happening. I believe that you can Google a video of the segment.

try this (cannot confirm right now) - http://www.bravotv.com/watch-what-h...de-81/videos/zoe-saldana-spills-avatar-sequel

 

[Ethros]

It'll happen when it happens.

New lead character then, Sam Worthington/Jake not gonna be the main character in this then. I suppose his story was pretty much told in the first movie, hope he's still in it but fair enough if it centers around someone else.


I just wish Arnie was starring so they could rename it Abadah

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[Vger23]

I care. I'm vastly more engaged by Avatar than by big-budget superhero shit (unless it's intentionally funny, like Deadpool and GoTG) or zombified old skiffy franchises like the revived Star Wars.

Based on box office over the last eight years that remains true for the international film-going audience.

While I am not a huge fan of Avatar, I agree wholeheartedly that it is better than the current deluge of superhero crapola we are exposed to every spring and summer.

As for Star Wars, I thought Episode VII was good. I thought R1 was barely above garbage, though.