In news that will surprise probably no one, James Cameron’s Avatar 2, the first of a seemingly endless barrage of upcoming sequels, is delayed. Call me crazy, but James Cameron should just cut his losses and move on.
Cameron discussed the most recent delay regarding Avatar 2, the first sequel to a 2009 film that everyone has pretty much forgotten about:
“Well, 2018 is not happening,” he told The Star (via JoBlo). “We haven’t announced a firm release date. What people have to understand is that this is a cadence of releases. So we’re not making ‘Avatar 2.’ We’re making ‘Avatar 2, 3, 4 and 5.’ It’s an epic undertaking. It’s not unlike building the Three Gorges dam. (Laughs) So I know where I’m going to be for the next eight years of my life. It’s not an unreasonable time frame if you think about it. It took us four-and-a-half years to make one movie and now we’re making four. We’re full tilt boogie right now. This is my day job and pretty soon we’ll be 24-7. We’re pretty well designed on all our creatures and sets. It’s pretty exciting stuff. I wish I could share with the world. But we have to preserve a certain amount of showmanship and we’re going to draw that curtain when the time is right.”
Here’s a TERRIFIC question nobody seems to ask the megalomaniacal filmmaker (probably for fear of being booted immediately from the interview): why? Why are you, James Cameron, aged 62, hell bent on spending the next eight years of your life and career churning out sequels to a movie everyone has wholly dismissed?
James Cameron is a talented epic action director, and I for one would rather see him work on something new and interesting. I, like everyone else, saw Avatar when it came out. And then, like an overwhelming majority of those people, I never bothered to go back and see it again. Because Avatar was a stale story with cool visuals that have since leaked over into hundreds of other, more interesting movies. One way or another, I wasn’t eagerly anticipating the second – or third, or fourth, or etc. – entry into Dances with Navi. No thanks, life is too short.
What is maybe more confounding is the announcement of a new Avatar World at Disney. Who in the WORLD is excited to go see this?
James Cameron’s ego has once again got the better of him. Avatar made all the money back in 2009, so of course he has some sort of delusional thought that it was the new Star Wars, or something deserving of an entire franchise and theme park dedicated to giant blue nothing characters. What he doesn’t think about is how lazy and stale Avatar is at its core, more Episode I than Episode 4-6 if we’re doing the Star Wars comparison; if The Phantom Menace were the first film we saw in the Star Wars universe, would anyone be excited to see any other entries?
But whatever, here we are. James Cameron is dead set on dumping Avatar 2 and beyond on the masses, even though he can’t even seem to get out of his own way and actually produce a single second of footage. Of course it’s too far along to just pull the plug now, at least I think it is. Who knows?
It’s been seven plus years since Avatar, and it feels like two decades. It sure would be nice if we could see something cool from the formerly vibrant imagination of James Cameron, not just a retread of a movie that was in itself a retread of better movies.
