Following the massive $232 million worldwide opening for Avatar at the weekend (which is the highest opening for an original film ever), the success continued with another $16.2 million on Monday in the US. This is the 3rd highest non-Holiday Monday behind Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and The Dark Knight. It appears strong word of mouth and positive reviews are giving the film a boost. It’ll be interesting to see how it does next weekend against Sherlock Holmes.
In other Avatar news James Cameron spoke to MTV about potential sequels. He says that he’s already got an arc figured out, and that if a sequel goes ahead it shouldn’t take another 4 years to get made:
Cameron made clear that the next film won’t be a prequel, recounting previous backstory, but will begin after the events of the initial movie. “We’ll follow Jake and Neytiri,” he confirmed.
In fact, Cameron intends to follow the couple for another two films. “I have a trilogy-scaled arc of story right now, but I haven’t really put any serious work into writing a script,” he said.
The next two films, however, won’t necessitate the four years of production time that “Avatar” took to perfect its motion-capture technology and computer-generated environments and beings. “Part of what we set out to do is create a world and create these characters,” Cameron said. “From the time we capture and finish the capture, it’s literally nine to 10 months to get the CG characters working, to get their facial musculature working. … So now we have Jake, we have Neytiri. Sam can step right back into it, the characters will fit them like a glove, and we’ll just go on. So a lot of the start-up torque that had to be done for one movie really makes more sense if you play it out across several films.”
I though Avatar was amazing. It’s my favourite movie of the year and I would love an Avatar trilogy, although i’m not sure how Cameron will be able to top the first film. Now he’s got the effects sorted he should concentrate on the story, which was really the only negative aspect according to a minority of critics. If he nails the story for the next two films we could have a new fantasy trilogy to rival The Lord of the Rings.
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