James Cameron is back to perform on the Avatar sequels, plus a few on-set photos give us a glimpse of what to expect. Under the new ownership of Disney, after they acquired Fox, the Avatar franchise is currently set in stone. With a reported budget of $1 billion over four movies, Avatar could be an integral section of Disney’s cinematic occasion. It is a new blockbuster with global appeal to combine with the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars. Avatar 2 now has a release date of December 17, 2021, with the subsequent three sequels to be released on December 22, 2023, December 19, 2025, and December 17, 2027.
It has been over a decade since Cameron surfaced Avatar, which helped usher in a brand new film-making era. The sheer spectacle of his sci-fi epic, with its pioneering and hyper-realistic use of CGI motion capture, dazzled audiences and became the highest-grossing movie of all time, a title it held until 2019’s Avengers: Endgame. Cameron frequently spoke of his expansive ambitions for Avatar as a groundbreaking cinematic franchise over time. He promised something more extensive and more quirky for Pandora’s world, but substantial information about Avatar’s future was thin on the floor for a very long time. Even as it stayed a record-breaker, Avatar seemed to drop out of the popular consciousness since the era of superheroes, Disney-owned Lucasfilm, and films like Mad Max: Fury Road reigned supreme. It didn’t inspire a legion of devoted fans since people took issue with characters and its cliched story, and even its gloss wore off. It looked like the entire world had no use for an Avatar franchise.
Cameron is now working on the series in New Zealand after production shut down caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The movie has released a tiny handful of set photos, and some details are given that the scope of the franchise and hype surrounding it. Here’s what those set images reveal about the long-awaited sequel.
Avatar 2 Is Happening In A Post-COVID World
The Avatar sequels started live-action filming in New Zealand from the Spring of 2019 and concluded in November with plans to restart the next year. Performance catch filming began in September 2017, which provides us a reminder of how ambitious Cameron’s intentions are. Live-action filming came to a halt as New Zealand went into lockdown in response. As a result of the country’s robust response to Cameron, the virus and company could return to New Zealand in June. On June 16, producer Jon Landau shared an image on Instagram of Cameron back in production, with his crew social distancing as much as possible.
The picture is a stark reminder that filmmaking may never be the same following the pandemic. Social networking is also to put it impossible when shooting a film or TV show. Until they would resume filming, Cameron’s cast and crew needed to do a two-week-long government-supervised isolation period. The cast and crew are all staying in precisely the hotel while restricting and filming their movements to prevent the spreading of the virus. This won’t be a unique situation when Hollywood decides to return to perform.
James Cameron Is Pushing Boundaries In Underwater Film-Making
The most recent set image shows Britain Dalton, celebrity news to the Avatar franchise, riding an underwater car while dressed in a motion-capture lawsuit, complete with camera in front of his face. Another image released earlier by Landau showed off some of those underwater vehicles that could be featured in the movie, such as the Matador, “a high speed forward control vessel.”
The primary hook for Avatar 2 so much is Cameron’s pushing of the boundaries of all underwater filmmaking. Cameron’s modus operandi for a manager for several decades now is to utilize the most ground-breaking and innovative technology for a means to further evolve old-school Hollywood storytelling, from the liquid metallic CGI in Terminator 2 to the significant recreation of this Titanic for the film of the same title. Cameron has already dabbled in underwater movie-making together with 1989’s The Abyss, which used a collection of substantial water tanks and a degree of physical and psychological labor that caused a number of the cast to fall ill have slight breakdowns. With Avatar two, Cameron would like to take this to another level. Cameron intends to capture underwater scenes as you can, something that modern filmmaking has struggled with, even as technology has advanced. CGI water doesn’t feel like real water. It is undoubtedly an aim, one who has never been done before and could once more alter the match of theatre if he pulls it off.
Avatar 2 Will Feature Pioneering Underwater Performance Capture
A vital characteristic of the underwater production is that the actors had to train to not only act but to do this while wearing full motion-capture gear. The film is said to follow Pandora’s communities. An image from May of the year showed celebrities Zoe Saldana, Sam Worthington, Kate Winslet, and Cliff Curtis in a 900,000-gallon tank where they were filming underwater scenes while surrounded by many white balls that were developed to stop light from reflecting on the water’s surface.
While Curtis is playing Tonowari, their leader Winslet is set to play a free-diver of the Metkayina tribe, Ronal. While details of the next four films’ plots remain scant, it is known that Avatar will continue to follow Jake Sully (Worthington), his partner Neytiri (Saldana), and their loved ones as they’re forced to leave home and explore the rest of Pandora’s rich world as an old threat returns. That threat will probably be the humans of the RDA mining app from the very first movie since most of the actors are returning, including the most crucial antagonist Stephen Lang, regardless of his lifeless character.
It had been shown that the cast was educated to free-dive for the movie, for instance, pre-teen kids playing with Neytiri’s and Jake’s children. This process enabled them to understand how to stay underwater when holding their breath. This combination of underwater production and performance capture hasn’t been achieved before. As Cameron himself noticed in 2015 in a meeting with Collider:
“It has never been done before, and it’s very tricky because our motion capture system, such as most motion capture systems, is the thing they call optical foundation, meaning it uses markers that are photographed with hundreds of cameras. The interface between the air and the water and that forms a mirror, although the problem with water is not the underwater part. That mirror reflects markers and all of the dots, and it produces a bunch of fictitious markers. It is a bit like a fighter plane dumping a bunch of chaff to confuse a missile’s radar. It generates thousands of goals, so we’ve had to work out ways to get. If you add water into any issue, it merely gets ten times harder. So, we’ve thrown a great deal of horsepower, invention, imagination, and new technologies in the issue. It’s taken us about a year and a half today to determine how we’re going to take action.”
It was seen if the Avatar sequels will capture the world’s imagination and deliver in precisely the same degree of financial clout since the initial one, particularly considering that viewer’s expectancy might have lagged because of the first movie’s release. However, what’s certain is that James Cameron remains committed to creating the sort of improvements in cinema which he has ambition, the drive, and the service to perform. In the precarious new post-COVID-19 age of Hollywood, Cameron remains as driven as ever to attract the entire world of the Avatar franchise to life.
