The same question keeps coming up every time we hear about James Cameron’s plans for a gazillion Avatar sequels all shot at once, or about some new element in the Pandora theme park being built by Disney. And that question is: Are people really pumped for this?
Image: 20th Century Fox
Avatar came out in 2009, which basically feels like a hundred years ago now. I was still in university. Rob Bricken was just embarking on a quest to read the worst erotic fanfiction. James Whitbrook was, I’m pretty sure, just a glint in the eye of a programmer trying to build the perfect blogger robot.
It feels, to us at least, that Avatar came and went. The 3D was a big deal, the movie itself generated some interesting articles, and then everyone just… moved on. Avatar wasn’t the kind of hit seemed to inspire a passionate following. We don’t see blue Pandorans cosplay flooding comic-cons. Hell, there’s another thing named Avatar that we see a lot more of.
So while we wouldn’t bet against Avatars 2-5, the question we have isn’t “will you see it?” but “how excited are you really?” Are you dying for more stories? Or just curious to know if, by the time we see it, Cameron will literally have created the technology to punch you in the face during the film? Or, like most of us, does every bit of news make you go, “Oh, right, they’re still doing that?”