Avatar: The Way of Costly Special Effects

This upcoming weekend will see the debut of Avatar: The Way of Water, the long-awaited sequel to James Cameron's hit 2009 movie. Skeptics of the new Avatar movie are being told by both film critics and fans alike to not "bet against Cameron" in light of his track record with effects-driven blockbuster films. On the other hand, Cameron himself has gone on record saying that the new Avatar movie has to become the third or fourth highest-grossing film in history just to be profitable, so one has to wonder: What happens when Cameron decides to bet against himself?

If anything, Cameron has become of the king of ever-ballooning production budgets. From 1991's Termintor 2 up to the new Avatar movie, the budgets for his films just keep getting larger. The budget for his last Avatar movie has been estimated at around to $237 million, which is a far cry from the $6.4 million budget of his first hit The Terminator (1984). If I didn't know any better, it almost seems like Cameron has used the enormous budget of the new Avatar movie to deliberately price himself OUT of having a box office hit. Hollywood can be funny that way.

Time-traveling killer robots, on the cheap:

A stop-motion sequence from The Terminator

When I think about the budgets of the Avatar movies, I can't help but to think about the production history of the first Planet of the Apes movie from 1968. That film was based on a 1963 novel named Monkey Planet by Pierre Boulle, which was about a human astronaut becoming stranded on a planet that is dominated by intelligent and technologically sophisticated apes. Even though Hollywood wanted to adapt the novel into a film, a faithful adaptation was considered very cost prohibitive. Thus, the film adaptation kept the novel's main plot but made the apes' civilization much less tech-savvy, which brought the production into an acceptable price range. This creative choice paid off: The movie was a hit that launched an enduring franchise full of movie sequels and remakes, comic books, TV shows, and so on. It also landed John Chambers an Academy Award for his ape makeup work, which by itself was a major achievement in special effects history.

(Then again, when comparing the original Planet of the Apes to Avatar, it's interesting to see how different these films are when it comes to depicting humans "going native" in an alien environment.)

The Avatar movies have been known for achievements and innovations in special effects techniques and technology, and Cameron will spend as much as he needs to for his movies. But whereas Planet of the Apes made changes to its source material in order to produce an affordable and worthwhile movie experience, I wonder if the stories that the Avatar movies are telling are worth so much investment. In other words, had Cameron decided to curtail some of his ambitions by producing the first Avatar movie as a feature-length CG animated film instead of a more expensive combination of live action and CG motion capture, would the first movie have been a box office success? 

The emphasis on spectacle and innovation was enough to make the first Avatar a box office hit, but I don't know if that will be enough to financially support a series of expensive films. I love 3D movies and creative usage of special effects, but I didn't think the story of the first Avatar was worth its production price tag and I don't expect the new film to be any different. It's also not reassuring that the new Avatar movie's hefty price tag still wasn't enough to pay some of its visual artists at Wētā Workshop more than minimum wage.

In the long run, what happens to Avatar as a film series may provide a commentary on when a storyteller should be willing to balance ambition with limitations, and whether the ambition in question is worth exceeding limitations at all. A good contrast to Cameron's expensive aspirations would be Mad God, a 2021 movie created by special effects veteran Phil Tippett. Mad God has been a passion project for Tippett, which he started way back in 1990 and eventually completed through volunteers, weekend work, and Kickstarter donations. When asked by Empire magazine about how he feels about his accomplishment, Tippett said, "the final form of Mad God isn't the film itself, but the memory after you watch it. It's bringing you to that moment just after waking up from a dream, frozen, exploring fragments of your feral mind before they fade back into the shadows. That's the moment. Mad God is just a way to get you there." My guess is that if Cameron said something like this when pitching Avatar to the studio, his budget would have been much, much smaller.