Avatar’s James Cameron Has Interesting New Answer About TV Series Potential

With an ongoing film franchise and theme park attractions, it’s probably inevitable that people would start to ask filmmaker James Cameron whether his Avatar movies could make the jump to the small screen. Bringing the world of Pandora to TV, after all, would alleviate the lengthy waits between film installments, and help keep the property “active” in the public imagination as Cameron works on his third and fourth (possibly fifth?) movies in the series. But right now, Cameron says, he doesn’t think the technology is where it needs to be, for an Avatar TV spinoff to look like he would want.

That might be surprising to some — after all, why not just find a workaround, like showing more of the human characters and saving the CG for when it’s needed? That obviously doesn’t square with how Cameron does things, though; the filmmaker is notoriously a perfectionist.

“Right now, the economics don’t make sense to spin off any of our CG main characters onto TV,” Cameron told the Los Angeles Times. “But the cost of these things will progressively come down as we introduce machine deep learning into the processes and make them more automated. Ask me again in five years.”

By that time, visual effects will likely have undergone another revolution — not unlike the one that happened after Avatar, or the one we’re currently living through with the Marvel-ification of blockbuster movies. In the meantime, it’s difficult to imagine Disney losing interest in the franchise, with both the first and second  movies being among the top five highest-grossing movies of all time and a theme park experience that ties Avatar to the Disney brand in a big way.

Here’s the official synopsis for Avatar: The Way of Water: 

Set more than a decade after the events of the first film, “Avatar: The Way of Water” begins to tell the story of the Sully family (Jake, Neytiri, and their kids), the trouble that follows them, the lengths they go to keep each other safe, the battles they fight to stay alive, and the tragedies they endure. Directed by James Cameron and produced by Cameron and Jon Landau, the film stars Zoe Saldana, Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Cliff Curtis, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Edie Falco, Jemaine Clement, Giovanni Ribisi, and Kate Winslet. To whet audiences’ appetites, the studio will re-release “Avatar” in theaters on September 23.

Avatar: The Way of Water has received mostly positive reviews from critics. It has a 78% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and a consensus that reads, “Narratively, it might be fairly standard stuff — but visually speaking, Avatar: The Way of Water is a stunningly immersive experience.”

Avatar: The Way of Water is now playing in theaters.

h/t Comic Book Movie