Movies Avatar 2: Way of Water

[Agent23]

In spite of an opening lower then expected opening and overall box offices in the US and China initially, the movie apparently broke one billion fairly quickly. The international box office is really big for this film apparently and while people don't seem in a rush to see it, they are still apparently seeing it eventually. 🤷‍♀️

Plus all of those big IMAX and 3D and IMAX 3D tickets pushing the box office even higher.

Yeah, well I suspect that more than 50% of the money for tickets will go towards the cinemas in that case, since all that 3D/IMAX shit ain't cheap.

Our theory is that the budget plus the advertising is more than 400 million, so it will need to make more than a billion just to break even.

There is still time for it to flop.

 

[Blasterbot]

Didn't Cameron say that it needed 2 billion to break even? they bet the farm on this being the biggest movie ever. matching what a marvel movie or star wars movie could do isn't enough. this has to be a record breaker.

 

[Husky_Khan]

They should've gotten the dude that directed Battleship to shadow direct this movie. Or ya know... Second Unit all of the battle scenes.

Maybe add ten or twenty minutes more of heavy gunplay. Shouldn't be hard to find other area to trim.

 

[Captain X]

• I might be mistaken, but I believe that the Venture Star used antimatter to propel itself, so there would be a humongous radiation trail for the ships. At the start of the movie, when the spaceships lower into the atmosphere and scorch the earth before releasing the drop pods, wouldn't they be irradiating the landing zone? Or did the humans swap out the engines on the spaceship to something that wouldn't emit radiation? Would that have enough thrusting power to keep the ship flying in atmosphere and lift the payload?
• Why don't the whalers harvest whale meat? They could use that meat to feed the growing population of Bridgehead. Tulkan ivory would also probably be really valuable too. Maybe harvesting brain-juice is just so much more profitable, but I'd imagine that there would still be a market for smaller whalers to follow the seadragon and harvest the leftover carcasses.

You're putting way more thought into this movie with these two points than any of the people who made this movie did. As for harvesting only the brain juice, the entire point of this series of movies is to make humans an analog for white people and to make them out to be evil. It's a Native Power fantasy fulfillment movie, with a side of white guilt. Them harvesting a very small part of the whale and leaving everything is the point, because that's part of what makes them evil. It's a combination of actual whale hunting, where they cut the carcass up and harvested the blubber, and tossed the rest overboard, and how the buffalo hunters would take the skins and leave the rest to rot.

 

[Syzygy]

Maybe add ten or twenty minutes more of heavy gunplay.

Cameron explicitly stated they removed footage of gunfire to avoid "fetishizing" firearms. Ten minutes worth, I think. Pretty hilarious given you can easily downplay a bullet wound in cinema (though by all rights people should be missing limbs considering the calibers in play), but there's no shortage of impalement. At least two characters got head kabob'd. It's not District 9 levels of gratuitous (ARC gun is probably the coolest, most disgusting representation of what happens when a body comprised of 60% fluid is vaporized), but it's still front and center.

It's a combination of actual whale hunting, where they cut the carcass up and harvested the blubber, and tossed the rest overboard

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't whale hunters use every part of the whale they caught since it was an absolute pain to catch them in the first place? Like sinews, blubber, bone, meat, baleen woven into baskets, etc. The popular conception of whale hunters extracting ambergris and leaving the rest to rot is a load of bull.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Cameron explicitly stated they removed footage of gunfire to avoid "fetishizing" firearms.

Pretty funny given that the final battle makes shooting machineguns while riding a dragon look cool.

 

[Lord Sovereign]

Given that the humans are just beginning to colonise Pandora, and resources might be stretched at this early stage, whale meat and blubber just aren’t things you throw aside.

Seriously, a lot of that could feed hundreds of people.

 

[Knowledgeispower]

My opinion on avatar/avatar 2 is that both sides are assholes and deserve a visit from the Steiner scout lance

 

[Blasterbot]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't whale hunters use every part of the whale they caught since it was an absolute pain to catch them in the first place? Like sinews, blubber, bone, meat, baleen woven into baskets, etc. The popular conception of whale hunters extracting ambergris and leaving the rest to rot is a load of bull.

If I remember right in the USSR if whalers were caught harvesting the meat for food they got less or no rations for their ship since they clearly didn't need it. so they got rather wasteful.

 

[Agent23]

My opinion on avatar/avatar 2 is that both sides are assholes and deserve a visit from the Steiner scout lance

Personally I am siding with the humans since they are:
a) My own species.
b) Are actually trying to do what a healthy interstellar species should do.Namely, expand and advance technologically.
c) Not manipulated by a gigantic smart tree/magical whales that use them as defense/drones.

The allegories fall flat given the tech level, IMHO, and are just more leftoid guilt pushing a la Pocahontas/noble savage/environmentalist crap.

If any form of logic was present in this franchise then the humans would have just thrown big rocks at any cat smurf settlements that were a problem, then resumed excavation in the first film.

And that is just the military aspect of things.

I am pretty sure that at least some catsmurfs would have loved to gain access to more advanced tech and align themselves with the short, pale aliens in order to deal with the enemy tribe right next door, or get access to advance medicines and all the other tech humans have.
You know, like RL Pocahontas's father wanted to do.
And the tech gap between the Catsmurfs and the Humans is orders of magnitude larger than that between the European settlers and the Amerindians.

IMHO the cat smurfs were basically controlled by the other "bigger fish" in Pandora's ecology, like the matrix tree and perhaps those whales they "chat about their families with".

Also, if interstellar expeditions for mining and research are possible and as easy as described in the film then humanity should have a huge presence all over the solar system, with lots of habitats/extraction facilities, and frankly the magical mineral we saw in the movie should be something that could be extracted from other objects in the star system where Pandora was, dunno if it was Alpha Centauri.

Whatever his visuals, Cameron knows jack shit about history, or economics, or anything else besides copying other people's ideas and making flashy movies that showcase his diving fetish.

 

[Bacle]

Fire Na'vi...so ripping off Dancing with Wolves isn't enough, now Cameron is going to rip-off AtLA.

 

[Urabrask Revealed]

I'm sorry, "of the universe"? Have these cats now gone to space? Has Pandora given them world trees to travel on?

 

[ParadiseLost]

"I'm gonna make a show called Avatar about a water tribe that gets attacked by a fire nation, upsetting the balance of the world! It'll be my most original idea yet!"

- James Cameron, probably

 

[Lord Sovereign]

Fire Na'vi...so ripping off Dancing with Wolves isn't enough, now Cameron is going to rip-off AtLA.

That would actually be an interesting concept if it involved Na'vi with gunpowder tech, if not a society that has hit an industrial revolution. Indeed, I'd chuckle if they dismissed tribes like the Omaticaya as primitive savages.

 

[Bacle]

That would actually be an interesting concept if it involved Na'vi with gunpowder tech, if not a society that has hit an industrial revolution. Indeed, I'd chuckle if they dismissed tribes like the Omaticaya as primitive savages.

Nah, it's going to be about the 'Ash People', who probably have actually harnessed fire, unlike the rest of the NA'vi, which will make them the 'bad' Na'vi.

Just waiting to see if there is an exiled prince with a burn scar among them, to see how badly Cameron is going to rip-off AtLA.

 

[Lord Sovereign]

Nah, it's going to be about the 'Ash People', who probably have actually harnessed fire, unlike the rest of the NA'vi, which will make them the 'bad' Na'vi.

Ah, a pity. Na'vi dragoons (men with muskets who ride Ikran) would have been cool.

 

[Typhonis]

Given that the humans are just beginning to colonise Pandora, and resources might be stretched at this early stage, whale meat and blubber just aren’t things you throw aside.

Seriously, a lot of that could feed hundreds of people.

Add in whatever it is they use to refresh the air they breathe. Sure they use masks outdside but they must have some sort of life support. Life support that could include food growth.

Now to play Devil's Advicate.....is the meat safe for human consumption or does it contain trace toxins that will build up and kill people?

 

[Urabrask Revealed]

is the meat safe for human consumption or does it contain trace toxins that will build up and kill people?

Good question. I wouldn't put it past Pandora to be a spiteful bitch and add poison that results in something like Amber Lead Syndrome. However, that would take time, depending on the gestation period of the various animals being hunted and butchered. It could take at least five generations before the first animals carry these trace toxins.

 

[Sailor.X]

Simple solution for the problem. Kill the Tree and all trees like it. Land Asteroids on the area or just nuke it. Since Humanity in this universe has gone asshole. Might as well go full bore Epic Level Asshole.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

My guess is that the Ash peoples live in a desolate wasteland and their spirit tree is dead and they have renounced Ewya. Cameron has said in other interviews that he's going to do a Na'vi vs Na'vi story. The real question is why the Ash people would fight the Omaticaya or Metkayina clans? The first 2 movies paint a picture of there being many clans of the same type of people (ie, several clans of forest Na'vi, several different clans of water Na'vi) distributed across a large area. In Avatar 1, Jake sent messengers across the forest and recruited many different clans. In Avatar 2, Jake's family had to spend several days flying across the ocean from the forest to reach the islands that the Metkayinas were, and we find out that there were several other water villages on other islands (not sure if they were also Metkayina or if they were other clans). So the Ash people would probably be quite a distance away, just like the distance between the forest and water Na'vi. Ash people travelling long distances to attack the forest or water peoples doesn't make sense. If they wanted to migrate to more prosperous, fertile territory then they probably don't need to go all the way to the Metkayina or Omaticaya's territory.

Some people have been speculating that the RDA is going to make a deal with one of the Ash clans, giving them refrigerators and guns and stuff in exchange for mining rights or cooperation. Maybe the RDA will pay them to fight against the RDA's enemies? But again, you get into the distance issue. The Ash people must value refrigerators a lot to travel that far, or they really just really hate the other Na'vi peoples who worship Ewya.

Also curious as to what new method of transportation the Ash people would use. The heroes have fast flying beasts (Banshees and Skimwings) and fast aquatic beasts (Illu and Skimwings). If the Ash people only ride Direhorses then they wouldn't be able to threaten the heroes who can fly high up or dive deep underwater. I suppose the Ash people could just use Banshees and Illu and Skimwings too, but that'd be boring. The second movie already had the villains taming Banshees to attack the heroes.