While James Cameron’s Avatar is still riding high at the box office, thus far grossing $1.3 billion worldwide, Cameron is already discussing his plan for sequels. In fact, it turns out that Cameron has been thinking in terms of a multi-film series all along, just as George Lucas did in the early days of his Star Wars franchise.
“I’ve had a storyline in mind from the start,” Cameron told Entertainment Weekly. “There are even scenes in Avatar that I kept in because they lead to the sequel.”
Of course, Cameron being the commercially savvy film maker that he is, isn’t thinking merely in terms of narrative exigencies. He’s also mindful of economies of scale. “It just makes sense to think of it as a two or three film arc, in terms of the business plan,” Cameron said. “The CG plants and trees and creatures and the musculo-skeletal rigging of the main characters — that all takes an enormous amount of time to create. It’d be a waste not to use it again.”
As seems typical of most Cameron films, Avatar has set new records both as a revenue-generator and a budget-eater. Estimates of Avatar’s production budget range from $230 million (The New Yorker) to nearly $500 million (The New York Times). A Los Angeles Times report pegged it at $280 million for production alone, which is close to the official budget figure. This excludes marketing costs, which are expected to reach $150 million. So all told, by conservative estimates, production and marketing costs should reach at least $430 million.
It’s no wonder that Cameron would like to recycle some of his virtual props and scenery. CG effects, with which Avatar is well-saturated, are an expensive commodity. An 800 person team managed by Peter Jackson in New Zealand worked on Avatar full time for six months. If a certain portion of those effects were reusable or adaptable for a three-installment franchise, that could significantly reduce the average CGI cost per film.
While advances in technology often have the secondary effect of reducing costs, both Cameron and Peter Jackson suspect that this type of pricing model won’t be feasible for CG effects. “It’s not clear that the technology will come down in price in the near future,” Cameron said in a recent Newsweek interview.
“People are holding on to the idea of lowering the price,” Peter Jackson added. “The vast majority of the CGI budget is labor. Unless everything goes to China or Eastern Europe in the sweatshops, that sort of approach, labor is never going to go down. It’s only going to go up.”
