Avatar Shares A Pandoran Christmas Tale

As studios and film franchises prepare to mark the Christmas holiday with special messages, there’s one series that has a direct connection to this time of year that’s making a splash. The official Avatar Twitter account has revealed a Pandora themed version of “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” featuring plenty of references to that faraway planet and what happens there. You can read the tale below and find accompanying photos on Twitter! For the sake of clarity, this tale is tied directly into the Pandora – The World of Avatar attractions at Disney’s Animal Kingdom and not a specific tease of the upcoming sequels. The arrival of a teaser trailer for the sequel is inevitable but no official word on when that will happen has been reported.

This year marks ten years since the release of the original Avatar, the film that kick started the digital 3D craze in movie theaters worldwide. Avatar went on to become the highest grossing movie of all time worldwide after its release, bringing in $2.789 billion, beating out Cameron’s previous movie Titanic for the top title. As we know now, Avengers: Endgame has just barely eclipsed Avatar to be the new highest grossing movie of all time, sitting at $2.797 billion, but James Cameron is confident that Avatar will take the title back with a special theatrical re-release.

“I think it’s a certainty,” Cameron previously said about the prospect. “But let’s give Endgame their moment and let’s celebrate that people are going to the movie theater….I don’t want to sound snarky after I took the high road [by congratulating Endgame], but they beat us by one quarter of a percent. I did the math in my head while driving in this morning. I think accountants call that a rounding error.”

The highly anticipated Avatar sequel has been in the works for many years, and is currently scheduled to arrive in two years time on December 17, 2021. Cameron is confident in the sequels and recently offered a progress report on them, revealing that the performance capture of the first two movies is completely done.

“From 2013 until now we’ve mostly designed the whole world across four new movies,” Cameron said. “We’ve written, finished scripts for all four of those films. We’ve cast them, and we’ve [performance] captured movie 2, movie 3, and the first part of movie 4. We’re mostly done with the live action. I’ve got a couple months in New Zealand in spring, so we’re kind of on track with what we set out to do.”

“People don’t really understand the scope and complexity of the process,” he continued. “It’s like making two and a half big animated films. A typical big animated film takes about four years, so, if you do the math on that, we’re kind of right on schedule for December 2021.”

Avatar 2 is set to arrive in 2021 and will be followed by Avatar 3 on December 22, 2023, Avatar 4 on December 19, 2025, and Avatar 5 on December 17, 2027.