General Film News

[Hatredsheart]

https://x.com/officialavatar/status/182 ... rjrfIdkv4A

[Wrathbone]

To be fair to James Cameron, he was insistent back in 2009 that Avatar needed five films, for reasons I still can't fathom. The Avatar franchise has never made sense, though - the undeserved hype for the first one died within months, then Cameron spent thirteen years making the sequel which inexplicably took $2bn at the box office despite reviews not being great. It wasn't even like the sequel got hyped by the public or people were even talking about it. How the hell did it make that much? Was it a Hollywood-scale money laundering scheme?

[Drarok]

Somehow Disney were convinced it was going to be big, and they bought the lie so hard that they themed an area of their Animal Kingdom park around it, so they'll never stop pushing it.

[Wrathbone]

Jenny Nicholson did a great summary of the Avatar theme park a few years ago. I can’t imagine there are many greater misguided wastes of space and money on the planet, but like you say, Disney are still trying to cling to the belief that everyone’s going to want to paint themselves blue any day now.

[Raid]

I ended up watching that whole video (I'm not really a theme park person, but find Jenny Nicholson to be an oddly compelling storyteller). I find it baffling that any exec would sign off on an Avatar theme park where they couldn't have any Na'vi. Like, I get it, there would be serious obstacles to realistically portraying that species in live action given they're ten feet tall and have unsettlingly stretched proportions that meant you couldn't just have a human in a costume, but they're the only recognisable part of the franchise! Pandora's an interesting biosphere, but could you tell you honestly recognise any of the other creature designs?

[Rusty]

Just started watching that video... how can anybody with that many subscribers get away with 720p max? I thought my internet had gone down or something

[Wrathbone]

It was from about 5 years ago - 720p was fairly commonplace on youtube back then.

On a side note, I hate how you can tell the youtube app (i.e. on phone or tablet - browsers seem okay) to use the highest available quality and it will still typically choose 720p when 1440p or 4k are available and you have to manually select the resolution you want. On a gigabit connection too, so it's not like the app is detecting poor bandwidth.

[Alan]

Most people don’t care, especially on phone so it saves Google boatloads of cash.

[Animalmother]

Ufffff

I'm sure kids will love it, probably...