James Cameron has been living on Pandora for a long time. But 13 years after the original “Avatar” and five years after starting production on its sequel, “The Way of Water,” Cameron is unveiling the long-awaited follow-up to the highest grossing film of all-time. Speaking the day after “The Way of Water” debuted in London, Cameron — back on Earth and self-admittedly out of practice with the hoopla of a red-carpet premiere — describes the experience of finally having the movie out in the world “surreal.”
NEW YORK — James Cameron has been living on Pandora for a long time.
For a long time, the “Avatar” sequel was the “Waiting for Godot” of blockbusters – more theoretical than real, with release dates that kept spiraling into the future. Meanwhile, an unending parade of pieces pondered the original’s curious place in entertainment: a box-office behemoth with little cultural footprint, a $3 billion ghost.
The film, which opens in theaters Thursday, might be Cameron’s most ambitious undertaking yet -- which is saying something for the 68-year-old filmmaker of “Titanic,” “The Terminator” and “Aliens.”We've been here before. After cost overruns and delays, “Titanic” was written off as a sure-to-bomb case study of Hollywood excess. Then it made $2.2 billion in ticket sales and won 11 Oscars. Not everyone was pre-sold on “Avatar,” either, which resuscitated 3-D after decades of dormancy.
The trials the family endures turn surprisingly wrenching in what's already been called Cameron's most emotional film. That may be partly because much of Cameron’s own experience as a father raising five children in New Zealand is woven into the film, as is his early life growing up in Ontario as the eldest son of an electrical engineer father.
“We’re able to deliver a much greater ability of photorealism than we ever did before,” says producer Jon Landau. “When we made the first movie, I would say to people, ‘We need it to be photographic.’ Now in this movie, we have so many Avatar, Na’vi characters in the live-action world and we have so many live-action characters in the Pandora world, we need to be photoreal. That’s a new standard we have to live up to.
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