20th Century Fox
People, I have a condition. A compulsion, if you will. Something I truly cannot help myself from doing no matter how hard I try… I’m addicted to shitting on Avatar.
Since the turn of the new year, I’ve written two articles about the formerly highest-grossing film of all time, neither of which were particularly friendly:
Sometimes, it worries me that I harbor so much hate for a decade-plus-old movie that I’ll spend precious pats of my day ranting and raving about it on the internet to no one in particular, but then I remember where this all began… actually seeing Avatar.
Don’t get me wrong, James Cameron is a visionary director — The Terminator, Aliens, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and Titanic are all quite literally iconic — and deserves all the respect in the world… but Avatar is big trash. I don’t really have some sort of heady analysis of why its previous status as the most successful movie ever is absolutely laughable, because all I need to do is point out this: it’s more or less about a human man falling in love with and having sex with another species. We have words for that in the English language, and similar to my previous articles about Avatar, they’re not particularly friendly.
All of this is just a long, pointless, slightly insane way of saying you could only imagine my glee when I saw that one of the film’s stars said that filming four sequels at once — that’s right, not only has Avatar 2 been delayed multiple times, but they’ve got another two after that in the works! — is “a little confusing”. Inject it into my veins.
Stephen Lang, who plays the villainous Colonel Miles Quaritch, recently spoke to The National about how overwhelming it was to film so much footage for multiple sequels Cameron has planned. “I’ve given up trying to keep track,” Lang says when asked how many script pages and hours of footage has been logged. “The whole thing gets a little confusing.” [via IndieWire]
Unfortunately for me, though, despite what feels like a decade of screaming into the unresponsive abyss about how fucking terrible Avatar is, the long-awaited and essentially living-memes that are the planned sequels are due to start coming out in 2021. You know, just a casual 12 fucking years after the original came out.
Whatever, I take solace in knowing that the franchise has to rock with Sam Worthington as its lead, who has become a C-List actor since starring in the original.
***
Eric is a New York City-based writer who still isn’t quite sure how he’s allowed to have this much fun for a living and will tell anyone who listens that Gotham City is canonically in New Jersey. Follow him on Twitter @eric_ital for movie and soccer takes or contact him eric@brobible.com