On December 10, 2009, James Cameron's "Avatar" premiered in London, England, and a month later, "Avatar" came to China, setting off an unprecedented wave of 3D.
In 2010, theaters in China and even around the world were blue, and wherever you go, you can see movie posters of blue giants riding dragons soaring in the sky. Less than two months after its release, "Avatar" broke the highest box office record set by "Titanic". Counting the revenue from re-screenings in recent years, "Avatar" has accumulated a global box office of $2.789 billion, beating "Avengers 4" to return to the world's first box office.
The success of "Avatar" does not need to be repeated.
According to the conventional operation of Hollywood's pursuit of victory, such a successful movie should seize the popularity to launch a sequel and continue to "attract money" around the world. Unfortunately, in the next ten years, we didn't even see the title of the sequel to "Avatar".
Finally, today, thirteen years later, the sequel "Avatar: The Way of Water", which has undergone repeated postponements, has good news.
According to the latest theatrical news, "Avatar: The Way of Water" will be released in Chinese mainland on December 16, and the film is 190 minutes long, nearly 30 minutes longer than "Avatar".
Cameron responded to the expectations of fans around the world for returning to the planet Pandora with a length of more than three hours, and the "box office god" will soon paint global cinemas blue again with a new special effects masterpiece.
Return to the planet Pandora
The story of "Avatar: The Way of Water" takes place five years after the plot of "Avatar", and Jack Sully, a former disabled soldier on Earth, became the patriarch of the Na'vi tribe of the planet Pandora after swapping bodies, and gave birth to a pair of lovely children with his wife Natalie.
However, humanity's ambition to conquer the planet Pandora did not disappear with the withdrawal of troops, and Jack discovered that the human Avatar had mixed into the tribe and wreaking havoc, so he decided to lead the tribe out of the forest to find a new territory.
The subtitle of "The Way of Water" indicates that the ocean scene will be the focus of this sequel, and from the trailer released so far, you can also see a lot of sea-related pictures, including flying low above the sea, swimming in the water, riding marine life, etc., the magnificent sea is the new visual feast that Cameron presents to us this time.
Cameron is known to love the sea deeply. In 2012, Cameron rode the Mariana Trench at a depth of about 11,000 meters below the Pacific Ocean of Deidara, a deep-sea challenger, and stayed in the deepest abyss of the earth for about three hours, setting a new record for a single submersible to reach the deepest part of the earth.
Cameron once mentioned in an interview that exploring the sea and directing movies are his two major interests, and he can combine these two pleasures in the process of filming "Avatar: The Way of Water", which is really a beautiful thing for him.
"Avatar: The Way of Water" has been thirteen years since the release of "Avatar", and it is difficult for fans to wonder about such a long production time, what has Cameron been doing in the past ten years?
Cameron said that he initially envisioned making "Avatar" into a trilogy, but as he deepened, he found that the story created by the team was expected to be so grand that it could expand "Avatar" into a series of five films.
Cameron spent four years writing the script alone, and then another five years designing different creatures, cultures, and costumes with the team on the planet Pandora.
That is to say, in these thirteen years, Cameron did not simply shoot a sequel to the movie, but created a macro story universe around "Avatar", and it is no wonder that "Avatar: The Way of Water" has been difficult to produce.
Cameron revealed in an interview with the media that the second and third parts were filmed back-to-back (one after another in a row), and he has now completed the shot shooting of the first part of the third and fourth parts, and the third part is expected to be released in December 2024.
▲ Image from: GQ
As for whether the fourth and fifth parts will meet the audience, it depends on the performance of the first two at the box office. Cameron mentioned in an interview with "GQ" magazine that the shooting cost of "Avatar: The Way of Water" is very high, and it must become the third or fourth highest-grossing film in film history to achieve breakeven.
He called it "the worst business case in the history of cinema."
Every frame is hard-won
The extremely high shooting cost is inseparable from Cameron's more honest attitude towards each frame.
Leaving aside the preliminary work such as writing the script, story setting, and character design, Cameron has taken an extraordinary serious attitude in tuning actors, filming and post-production, etc., just to present the most extreme and spectacular visual effects in front of the audience.
The first is the action of the actors. Since Avatar: A Way of Water has a large number of scenes that take place underwater, Cameron believes that the best way to make the actors look like they are in the water is for the actors and photographers to go underwater and do live-action motion capture.
To this end, Cameron brought in the best breath holding experts to teach the actors how to hold their breath in the water for a long time and move freely in the water.
After a period of training, "Avatar: The Way of Water" heroine Zoe Saldana can hold her breath in the water for about 5 minutes, while another Oscar actress Kate Winslet is the longest time in the actor who can hold her breath underwater, and she can stay underwater for 7 minutes in one breath.
"Avatar: The Way of Water" is not the first film to shoot a lot of the bottom of the sea, before that, films such as the DC Comics adaptation of the live-action superhero movie "Aquaman" were stories that took place in the deep sea, but most of these films were filmed on land through green screen Gavia Galvia, Cameron said it was difficult to capture the real dynamics of people in the water.
Cameron's team once did a comparative experiment for this, they shot a clip of the actor's movement on land and in the water, the actor on the land imitated the movement in the water as much as possible, and after comparison, it was found that although the footage shot in the water was very rough, the shooting effect was still much better than that of "dry duck", so the team finally decided to put all their energy into underwater live shooting.
How to shoot 3D images underwater became the next problem for Cameron's team.
3D shooting is the soul of the Avatar series, and Cameron needed to ensure that each frame could unfold in front of the audience in a three-dimensional form, so the underwater 3D shooting problem must be solved.
Underwater shooting, especially 3D underwater shooting, is a huge challenge for photographers, because the movement of light in the water is very different from that on land, and the equipment on land is used directly underwater, and the picture captured is very gloomy and distorted, which seriously affects the quality of the image.
At this time, Australian cinematographer and scientist Pawel Achtel ACS brought a solution to Cameron, and he invented a 3D diving beam splitter called Deep X 3D in 2015, which can avoid the problems of geometric distortion and chromatic aberration that may occur in underwater shooting and shoot clear 3D pictures.
Another feature of the Deep X 3D camera system is its lightness, which is only 30 kilograms - it still sounds very heavy, but the same type of underwater camera can weigh more than 120 kilograms and requires a crane to move it, compared to the Deep X 3D has been able to meet the needs of photographers for handheld shooting.
Pawel Achtel ACS said the Deep X 3D wasn't built specifically for Avatar: The Way of Water, he originally built the camera for underwater shooting IMAX 3D films.
Later, Cameron learned about Deep X 3D through his website to find him, and after using Deep X 3D to shoot underwater footage, the whole team was amazed, Cameron said that Deep X 3D shot a distortion-free picture as if it was shot on land, making people immerse themselves in it without realizing it.
The use of high-tech shooting equipment when shooting movies has been an old tradition of the Cameron team, and when shooting "Avatar", the Cameron team and the Sony camera engineering team used two Sony F950 projectors to create a 3D Fusion stereo camera, which became the world's most advanced stereo camera system at that time.
ON AVATAR: WAY TO WATER, THE CAMERON TEAM AND SONY CONTINUED TO WORK TOGETHER TO CUSTOMIZE A SPECIAL SONY VENICE CINEMA PLAYER.
The Sony VENICE projector was Sony's first full-frame digital cinema projector in 2017, and the Cameron team held several meetings with Sony's engineering team to discuss how to adapt it for use in Avatar: The Way of Water.
In some crew photos, we can see the transformation results of both sides:
The two VENICE are split into a body part and a lens part (including the image sensor), the two are connected by Sony's wiring system, the body part is carried by the assistant, and the photographer only needs to shoot with the lens in hand, greatly reducing the weight of the handheld. The two lenses are placed vertically together, and the beamsplitter allows the two lenses to capture the left and right eyes separately, making the entire stereoscopic shooting system lightweight and compact.
With such a shooting system, Cameron's team was able to shoot closer, more flexible 3D scenes, giving the film a stronger sense of immersion and expression.
Prior to this, the huge size of the IMAX 3D camera did not allow the photographer to carry it casually, and when encountering some small scenes or close-up scenes, the photographer could only switch to a normal camera and then switch to 3D in post, and the overall effect would be greatly reduced.
Can't wait
"Avatar: The Way of Water" is a science fiction film and not a documentary, why did the Cameron team go to such great lengths to shoot movie images that were fake and real?
When asked this question by reporters, Cameron quoted a famous quote from explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau as an answer.
"You don't protect what you don't love." Jacques-Yves Cousteau knew that the way to make people fall in love with the ocean was to show them its beauty, complexity and magnificence.
Today, we're losing whales, dolphins, sharks, and we're losing coral reefs as the ocean dissolves more carbon dioxide. A hundred years from now, when people look back, they may say, "We had all this beauty, but we didn't cherish it." So that's what the film [wants to convey], but in an organically integrated way as part of the storytelling, with warnings [to the environment] interspersed between the lines.
Judging from the information released by the current "Avatar: The Way of Water", its intention and production level are fully worthy of its status as a sequel to the "most successful commercial film in film history", and it stands on the shoulders of giants and looks farther away.
Since the pandemic, it is an indisputable fact that the film industry has weakened. According to box office statistics, as of November 22, the total box office in 2022 was 29.7 billion yuan, which fell back to the total box office level in 2014.
We seem to have some less reason to go to the cinema, and more and more people choose to embrace streaming media and choose to watch movies at home compared to movie theaters that lack blockbusters.
Cinemas need a blockbuster for the big screen to save revenue, and fans need a beautiful movie to soothe their souls.
In these thirteen years, we need Avatar: The Way of Water more than ever.