The new “Avatar” will be shown in several Russian cinemas, despite the boycott announced by Hollywood studios.
The first Avatar was released in December 2009. And at the end of January 2010, it became the highest-grossing film in cinema history: it grossed two billion dollars and knocked James Cameron’s previous film Titanic off the pedestal. . Now, factoring in the fees that the relaunch brought, Avatar has nearly $3 billion in its bank account. The fantasy of a disabled person finding happiness and a new home on the planet Pandora can officially be considered the greatest escapist fantasy in movie history. (By the way, NB: Pandora is not actually a planet, but a satellite of the planet, a gas giant in the Alpha Centauri system.)
With the original Avatar, James Cameron tinkered for 15 years: he wrote the first draft of the script in 1994. And he worked on the sequel for 13 years. And this time he started by writing the scripts for four Avatars at once. The first two sequels were filmed simultaneously (Avatar: The Way of Water opens in the US on December 16, 2022; Avatar 3 is scheduled for a December 2024 release). If these movies raise enough money and nothing extraordinary happens, the shooting of new movies will start and Avatar 4 will be released on December 18, 2026 and Avatar 5 on December 22, 2028.
Cameron’s new movie is called Avatar: The Way of the Water.
Cameron didn’t exactly keep the plot of Avatar 2 a terrible secret. Almost from the beginning, it was known that the action would take place largely underwater (diving, and especially deep diving in submersibles, is Cameron’s old passion: he went down to the wreckage of the Titanic and reached the Trench of the Marianas). A year ago, everyone already knew that the action of “Avatar-2” begins about 14 years after the end of the first part. The heroes have significantly increased their social status: the former Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) has become the leader of the clan. He and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) have children who will be at the center of the new movie. There were rumors that Cameron made the whole project something of a family saga, as if the heroes in the next Avatars were even more distant descendants of Jake and Neytiri.
KATE WINSLET SPENT 7 MINUTES 14 SECONDS UNDERWATER
Well, now that press passes have been made in the United States, other details of the plot of El camino del agua are being clarified.
Jake and Neytiri have two sons and a daughter, as well as two adopted children. This is the girl Kiri, somehow a descendant of the avatar of Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) and the human boy nicknamed Spider, the son of Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the main villain of the first film. Additionally, Quaritch in the sequel is resurrected in the form of a “recombinant”, an avatar with human memories embedded in the brain. The Earthlings still hope to colonize Pandora, Jake and Neytiri wage a kind of guerrilla war against them, Quaritch captures his children, but they manage to free everyone except Spider. Quaritch hopes to win over his newly discovered son to his side. How long, short, but the whole blue family decides to move to another area of Pandora, to the oceanic reef area, where the Metkayina clan lives. They are very similar to the Na’vi, the familiar inhabitants of Pandora, only their skin is aquamarine in color and covered in tattoos, like that of the Maori land tribe. (Cameron bought a large property in New Zealand some time ago, and it was there that he worked on the new Avatars.)
Weaver and Lang starred in the sequel, despite the fact that their characters in the first film died. When shooting Avatar, image capture technology is used: the actor’s body is covered with sensors that read movements and facial expressions, and then an anthropomorphic caricature is created based on this. So anyone can play anyone. And Weaver, who is in her 70s, plays Kiri, a teenager, and Lang, respectively, the “recombined” Quaritch. Cameron, by the way, plans for this character to appear in two more sequels; apparently, only in the fifth movie will he finish off the adversary. Although, perhaps, in the course of the play he too is re-educated, like Cameron’s Terminator in Terminator 2.
Among the new characters, the most interesting is Ronal, the wife of the leader of the Metkayin clan. She is played by Kate Winslet, who starred with Cameron for the second time after “Titanic”, and again thrown by him into the oncoming wave. (She says she was very glad to be invited to Avatar 2: “Jim doesn’t work with suckers!”) This time, Winslet had to go seriously diving: for the sake of one scene, she held her breath underwater for 7 minutes 14 seconds (thus breaking Tom Cruise’s record for holding his breath for six minutes to film an underwater scene in an episode of Mission: Impossible). She remembers that, once on the surface and taking a breath, the first thing she asked was: “Am I dead? No? How long have I been underwater? When she informed Kate that she had broken the record, she exclaimed, “Give me the walkie-talkie, I want Jim to know right away!”
Cameron, however, was stern: he hinted that Cruise’s achievement is more significant for the cinema, because Tom not only hung out underwater, but performed various stunts. Whereas Winslet “didn’t even swim: he was motionless, in a state of static apnea. With it, you enter a zen-like state, like a trance, your heartbeat slows down. And he was specifically taught how to accomplish this.”
During the continuation of “Avatar” James Cameron worked for 13 years.
THE MOST EXPENSIVE MOVIE EVER?
Avatar. The Way of the Water” opens at a difficult time. It so happened that now there are almost no blockbusters not only on Russian, but also on American screens. With the exception of the “Black Adam” movie comics (in fact, it flopped) and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” (which grosses significantly less than the first “Black Panther”), Hollywood studios don’t deliver big budgets. . Attractive projects for the audience to the cinemas. And the owners of movie theaters moan and complain. Everyone hopes that in the face of such a lack of fish, the new Avatar will raise a lot: it is expected that in the first weekend it will amass at least 175 million dollars in the United States alone.
Still, James Cameron is nervous. In a recent interview with GQ, he claimed that “Way of Water” cost a hefty sum (although he didn’t reveal the exact cost of production). The director showed the journalist a short scene with special effects and drew attention to the fact that the title has the number 405. “This means that 405 versions of this shot were made before the result suited me… This movie was very expensive. – Not embarrassed in expressions, Cameron said. – This is the worst business case in the history of cinema. We have to be the third or fourth highest grossing movie ever. Only then will we get to zero!”
So he’s not sure if he can do the fourth and fifth movies. “The third one is almost ready, he will go out anyway.” What happens with the rest? It depends on the rates of the second and third Avatar. “I really hope we can do the fourth and fifth, because this is, overall, a great story. The fourth should be dead. He is a son of a bitch. I really hope I can make it!”
HOW TO SEE “AVATAR-2” IN THE CINEMA?
Of course, this movie will quickly appear in pirated torrents. But the new “Avatar” was created to see it on the big screen. And it will be shown in several Russian cinemas, despite the boycott announced by Hollywood studios in March. Of course, without the consent of the copyright holders. Some cinema chains, without noise and dust (and without special advertising), have long been showing all the Hollywood news, borrowing copies from the CIS; there, films from American studios continue to be released in Russian dubbing. In fact, these Russian cinemas now work in the same way as Soviet video theaters, only the screen is large and the sound is normal. Without delving into the complex technical process of copying copies (excuse the expression), which is slowly taking place somewhere in Kazakhstan, let’s say that the output quality is quite decent.
Of course, the appearance of “El camino del agua” in our cinemas will have to wait almost a month. New Year’s holidays are just around the corner, and this time, the most delicious for film distributors, will be dedicated to Russian films. According to the Boletín de la Distribuidora de Cine on its Telegram channel, “federal film chains that continue to show Hollywood content without the consent of copyright holders have entered into a kind of “gentlemen’s agreement”: they will not will show Avatar. The Way of the Water” by James Cameron until January 12, 2023, until the end of the “New Year’s Battle”. “In this way, theaters show that they are responsible to the Russian film business. We all end up in the same boat, and if we do not help each other in this situation, it will be difficult for greater coexistence within the industry”, emphasized one of the sources of our publication.
Simply put, the way will be cleared for “Cheburashka”, “Look”, “Ivan Tsarevich and the Gray Wolf-5” and other domestic films that will be released from mid-December to early January. And Avatar, as a competitor, will have to wait.
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