Revisiting Pandora

Fox, as well as Cameron and his cohorts at Lightstorm Entertainment, his production company, are expecting the three successive Avatar films — set for release in three straight Decembers beginning in 2016 — to transform their companies and possibly once again to set a new standard for large-scale, multimedia entertainment.

Billions of dollars are riding on the effort. The effects-heavy sequels will be expensive: Cameron has vaguely said their combined production cost would be less than $1 billion, though the movies cannot be budgeted until they are written.
But in Cameron, the project is being led by a director who helped redefine his industry with The Terminator, Titanic and the 3-D science fiction spectacle Avatar itself.

“Jim first and foremost in life is an explorer, and it’s what he does in his movies,” said Jon Landau, Cameron’s business partner. Landau described what he said had been a yearslong effort to conceptualise an entire Avatar universe that will be realised over 20 years or more in various media, some of which have yet to be invented.

“This is not about any one medium,” Landau added, referring to the elaborate ideas being developed by Cameron, along with a team of four screenwriters, and by a novelist, Steven Gould.

Gould, known especially for the science fiction book Jumper, is weaving those ideas into novels that are meant to read as if they had inspired, rather than were spun off from, Avatar.

Fox has waited, optimistically, through Cameron’s painstaking deliberations, but at some cost. The Avatar hiatus has led to some shrinkage at Fox, which last year fell to sixth among the major studios in market share. But the new Avatar films have open-ended storytelling potential — as purely original inventions, they are not limited by existing books or the ageing of a young star. And they are coupled with Cameron’s insistence on an ever more realistic audience experience.

In the view of Jim Gianopulos, Fox’s chief executive, that makes them worth the wait. “We’re going  to have merry Christmases for the next few years,” he predicted.

As the films roll out, Gianopulos said, Fox expects that a growing string of ancillary businesses will be helped along by an unusually robust online operation that is being built.

Fox executives at one point believed they might shoot an Avatar sequel in 2011. But Cameron became preoccupied with a growing tangle of commitments. Those included ultra-deep sea dives, now the subject of a self-narrated 3-D documentary, called Deepsea Challenge 3D, set for release by National Geographic Entertainment.

There were also extensive land purchases in New Zealand, as well as a largely concluded battle to defeat a half-dozen legal challenges to his authorship of Avatar.

At an Avatar-themed area in Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Orlando, Florida, for instance, Cameron helped design an attraction that by 2017 will plant visitors on his mythical planet of Pandora.

On a smaller scale, Cameron at a conference last month in Montreal announced that he would join with Cirque du Soleil to develop an Avatar-themed touring troupe, with a debut planned for next year.

Technologically, said Landau, the new films will step beyond the first, though he stopped short of promising radical changes to the 3-D and performance-capture techniques that gave a startlingly immersive feel to those who viewed Avatar.

As for plotlines, Landau only said that he expected all the films to follow the principal characters, played by Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana — one human, one not — who were central to the first. “It’s the story of their life together,” he said.