Avatar 2

Here is ‘The Way of Water.’

Disney also revealed the film’s official plot synopsis.

There are new photos, and a crazy new motion capture system.

Filming in motion-capture in a big pool of water is more complicated than you may think. James Cameron describes the crazy process for the ‘Avatar’ sequels.

James Cameron is the kind of director who likes to revolutionize the industry he works in whenever he makes a movie. Shot entirely in a new format of 3-D motion-capture, his Avatar wowed audiences with its visual style and groundbreaking effects, and Cameron is poised to do it again. He announced today that Avatar 2 will be projected in 3-D, but audiences won’t need their glasses.

By sheer chance, last week I spent five days at Disney World with my son’s high school choir, at the same time that Animal Kingdom officially opened its new “Pandora - The World of Avatar” area. Our group was slated to go to Animal Kingdom on Memorial Day, and I was eager to see how Disney had turned James Cameron’s 2009 prog-rock/science-fiction/eco-propaganda experiment into a real-world habitat. So on the morning before our designated day, I opened up the “My Disney Experience” app on my phone to check out the wait times. About forty minutes after the park opened, the line for the “Na’vi River Journey” ride was already three hours long. And the wait for “Avatar Flight of Passage?” Four hours.

It’s been nearly eight years since James Cameron’s Avatar took the global box office by storm, and while it’s become très chic for some corners of the internet to endlessly bash Avatar, I still maintain my stubborn affection for Cameron’s movie. Very few filmmakers can create action-driven science-fiction that operates at Cameron’s level; just look at how many times people have messed up Cameron’s Terminator franchise, a near-flawless formula for blockbuster movies that studios have nevertheless run directly into the ground. We may laugh at Cameron’s planned sequels, but they are both original (technically!) and creator-driven movies. Isn’t that what we claim to want from Hollywood?

Why is it that James Cameron’s updates about progress on his colossal plotted Avatar franchise always kind of sound like threats? In a brash nose-thumbing to the concept of economic bubbles, James Cameron went all in on his Avatar franchise gambit and decided to produce the next four films in the planned pentalogy concurrently...

It was just this past April that blockbuster alchemist James Cameron made the promise/threat of four sequels to his massively lucrative sci-fi fantasy Avatar. Having apparently calculated “eight years or so” as the optimal amount of time to let Avatar fever percolate before reaching a boiling point, the filmmaker hinted at plans for his follow-up(s) while accepting his honorary membership into the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers on Friday night. Indiewire reports that while entering an elite group of industry professionals devoted to expanding the technological reach of film, Cameron stated his intentions to bring Avatar even further into the future with groundbreaking techniques and equipment.

I’m probably the only person in the world who is actually excited for more Avatar movies. It’s a fact I made my peace with ages ago. If more Avatar films means more opportunities for James Cameron to direct large-scale futuristic war movies, and demonstrate more of the gruff “brothers-in-arms” humor that made Aliens such a success, then you can go ahead and make your Braveheart jokes. I’ll suffer through some wonky storytelling if it means more Cameron action sequences, thank you very much.

James Cameron hasn’t made any Avatar sequels yet, but he keeps adding more.

Not long ago, we wondered aloud why James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ had been largely forgotten about only five years later, despite being the biggest movie of all-time. It doesn’t even seem like there is a lot of anticipation for ‘Avatar 2’, which Cameron is developing concurrently with Parts 3 & 4. Well, people will suddenly have a little more time to start getting excited for an ‘Avatar 2’, because Cameron announced today that the upcoming sequel has been pushed back a full year, to December 2017.