avatar

It was the biggest movie in history. Then it was forgotten. But that might actually be a good thing.

The second-biggest movie ever will be streaming on Disney’s new service.

The wait to return to Pandora just got longer.

After numerous reports, Disney has finally acquired most of 20th Century Fox in a deal that will massively reshape the entertainment industry.

I like Avatar. Quite a bit, actually. On occasion, I have been known to defend the film, at length, on this very website. I would drop everything to hang out at Disney’s Pandora theme park if I could. (Stupid job, stupid beloved child.) But even I struggle to justify four Avatar sequels, which is supposedly the number of new films in James Cameron’s epic sci-fi series that will be coming in the years ahead.

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.

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...

Another day, another Hollywood lawsuit. TMZ reports that director James Cameron, his production company, and 20th Century Fox are being sued for stealing the idea for the hit movie ‘Avatar,’ the number one film of all-time. A screenwriter claims that Cameron stole the idea from two different screenplays he wrote and wants $2.5 billion. That’s right, it’s BILLION, with a “B.”