Avatar became the first movie in history to exceed $2.78 billion at the box office.
Throughout his career, James Cameron broke many records. The director’s first financial success was “Titanic,” which remained the highest-grossing film in history for 12 years. In 2009, it was replaced by Avatar and earned $2.78 billion at the global box office. Later, with the help of reruns, the film managed to collect several million more and approached $3 billion.
Meanwhile, Avatar: The Way of Water is predicted to have a rough fate in the post-pandemic world: the second installment of the Cameron series should at least raise at least $2 billion to recoup the funds spent. promotional campaign.
Matt Damon just missed the biggest acting fee ever
Cameron initially considered Matt Damon and Jake Gyllenhaal for the lead role of Jake Sully. At the time, however, Damon was shooting The Bourne Ultimatum and Gyllenhaal was preparing to shoot Prince of Persia.
Recently, a video with Damon went viral on the network, where he admitted that by refusing to shoot in Avatar, he deprived himself of the largest acting fee in history. According to him, when Cameron invited him to the project, he promised Damon 10% of the box office proceeds, amounting to $280 million, in addition to the fee.
“I’m definitely going to go down in history because you won’t find an actor who has lost more money than me,” Damon joked.
Avatar is inspired by a Disney cartoon.
Cameron began work on the first script for Avatar in the mid-1990s. After watching the Disney cartoon “Pocahontas” about the love of an Indian girl and colonist John Smith, Cameron wrote his own story where a soldier fell into a new world for himself and fell in love with one of the inhabitants of an unusual planet.
Additionally, Jake Sully’s initials are identical to the animated John Smith’s initials, and Cameron originally wanted to cast Q’orianka Kilcher, who plays Pocahontas in Terrence Malick’s feature film New World, for the role of Neytiri.
Sam Worthington lived in a car before starring in Avatar.
Before filming Avatar, Worthington was more or less famous in his native Australia, but his Hollywood career never took off – so much that he had almost no income. The poor actress had to live in her own car. Joining Avatar changed Worthington’s personal and professional life 180 degrees, but he still remembers those times with pain.
“I had a good career in my country, but in America everything had to start from scratch and I didn’t have enough strength and desire for it. I would only blame myself for this, because I did not fight for a better life, I just went with the flow, ”the actor said.
“Avatar” wouldn’t have been possible without the technical progress of “Lord of the Rings”
James Cameron finished work on the Avatar script before filming began on Titanic, but was unable to start implementing his idea in the late 90s due to a lack of technical talent at the time.
It was only after seeing Gollum in Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” that the director got his first chance to make “Avatar” the way he dreamed. The character in Tolkien’s film adaptation was not drawn using CGI. He was portrayed by British actor Andy Serkis, and the hero was digitized using motion capture technology, a method by which special sensors on the artists’ body read their movements and facial expressions, thus making their on-screen characters as realistic as possible.
The influence of Hinduism on the skin color of the inhabitants of Pandora
When asked why the Na’vi are blue, Cameron said that his mother once had a dream about a tall blue woman. The director liked this image and with the help of the appearance of Hindu gods, he finalized the image. Vishnu, Rama and Krishna are traditionally depicted with blue skin. Moreover, the term “avatar” derives from a Sanskrit word meaning “corporeal manifestation of divinity”.
The sounds of alien creatures are borrowed from dinosaurs from “Jurassic Park”.
If you’re familiar with the growls of fantastical creatures from the planet Pandora, it’s because we’ve already heard all these predatory sounds in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. For example, flying Leonopteryx uses the roar of a Tyrannosaurus rex.
This creative borrowing is no accident: sound and sound effects artists Jana Vance and Denny Thorpe were involved in the production of Jurassic Park before working on Avatar.
After the release of the movie, James Cameron was accused of plagiarism.
In 2011, American artist Gerald Moravsky accused James Cameron and Lightstorm Entertainment of plagiarism. Moravsky said he met Cameron in 1991 and then told the director about the author’s idea for “Guardians of Heaven.” The artist presented a story about a giant company that mined ore in the rainforest, thus subjecting a local Aboriginal tribe to death. Seeing many similarities between his story and the subject of Avatar, Moravsky demanded $700 million in compensation.
In 2015, the trial ended and Judge Margaret Morrow ruled in Cameron’s favor. According to Morrow, Cameron managed to prove the originality of his plan while there was no evidence of any material damage against Moravsky, and the case was closed.
Due to “Avatar”, China changed the name of one of the objects of the Zhangjiajie park
Avatar’s graphic design team created Pandora’s flying cliffs inspired by the column tops in China’s UNESCO World Heritage Site of Zhangjiajie National Park.
The most picturesque of these, the Southern Sky Pillar, was officially renamed Mount Avatar Hallelujah in January 2010 in honor of Cameron’s film. At the same time that the tape was released worldwide, the Chinese government briefly suspended the movie’s theatrical release, fearing that the uprising of the Na’vi tribe shown on screen would inspire the revolution and the citizens of China.
The original Na’vi language was invented for the film
Paul Frommer, a linguist and lecturer at the University of Southern California, has created a unique 1000-word language specifically for Avatar. Following the movie’s incredible popularity, dedicated websites and web apps have sprung up to enable fans of the movie to master the fictional Na’vi language in as little as three months.