The first Avatar, released in 2009, became the highest-grossing movie of all time and netted an Oscar for the flick\u2019s impressive visual effects.<\/p>\n
Filmed in Aotearoa as part of a 2013 deal between the Government, Lightstorm Entertainment and 20th Century Fox, the franchise has contributed a whopping $1.1 billion to the local economy.<\/p>\n
Director James Cameron became a New Zealand citizen in August, having lived here \u201con and off\u201d since 2011, before he moved formally to the Wairarapa with his wife and three children.<\/p>\n
He attended the film\u2019s premiere last week at Wellington\u2019s Embassy Theatre, where he spoke to the Herald about the future of the franchise.<\/p>\n
Director James Cameron on the red carpet at the Avatar: Fire and Ash premiere at the Embassy Theatre in Wellington. Photo \/ Annaleise Shortland <\/p>\n
The fourth and fifth volumes of the story are set to be released on December 21, 2029, and December 19, 2031, with principal photography beginning during filming of the previous two films.<\/p>\n
However, Cameron said the sequels would be made only if Fire and Ash was a box office success.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t even tell you that there will be another Avatar film. That business model itself may have collapsed,” he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverybody\u2019s belt-tightening right now. Because the theatrical marketplace has reduced by about a third, that\u2019s a big deal. So, big films like Avatar aren\u2019t getting greenlit.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Oscar winner said he was excited for New Zealanders to see the locally produced film, praising the 3000-plus people who worked on it.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not just the capital of the country, we\u2019re the film capital of the country for sure. Not to put down Auckland at all or some of the other places, but you know, we\u2019ve got all the people from W\u0113t\u0101 here, W\u0113t\u0101 Workshop, W\u0113t\u0101 FX and all the tradespeople, all the crew people who have worked on these films. We do the live action here and we also do the VFX [visual effects] here.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first Avatar, released in 2009, became the highest-grossing movie of all time and netted an Oscar for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":195480,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[121048,15408,95,4921,59871,18296,115626,3088,127,1139,156,593,2079,13687,1437,10750,14054,5978,409,111,10511,139,69,6270,33027,10521,5976,3502,3755,2726,33210,102],"class_list":["post-195479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-600m","tag-almost","tag-and","tag-ash","tag-avatar","tag-box","tag-camerons","tag-commercial","tag-despite","tag-dominated","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-fire","tag-franchise","tag-global","tag-instalment","tag-james","tag-might","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-newest","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-office","tag-offices","tag-opening","tag-short","tag-success","tag-third","tag-tops","tag-warnings","tag-with"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195479\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/195480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}