Partly, an appreciation of Avatar requires a modicum of maturity and patience. Maturity in that there are social frictions against expressions of delight in beauty and biological wonder, which is the key avenue of appreciation of Avatar. Patience is required because there are plenty of topics to debate and discuss, but even the movie gives those options little attention. I'm thinking of the distinction of Na'vi physiology compared to the rest of Pandora, why it is that humans are so accommodated to it, the tension between Jake's familocentric vs Neytiri's tribal social order, to say nothing of the religious tension, and other little wrinkles. Many of those things will require slow ponderous thoughts, made stickier with the colonial/white savior angles, that won't register in the wider populous until much later (if at all).
Anyway, I enjoyed this and will read anything on Avatar, ponderous or silly.
2009 Avatar is underrated quotable--I still think "They are mated before Eywa" anytime I pass a public wedding or can't separate two pieces of cheese stuck together in the package.
"The Na'vi plug their hair-tentacle things directly into animals and trees because belonging matters more than owning. So when you try to mass-produce millions of plastic action figures based on characters who represent anti-consumerist values, you've created this bizarre ouroboros of hypocrisy that even the most devoted fan can feel in their bones."
More than that, even making this film through the studio system as James Cameron and raking in a few billion dollars seems contradictory somehow. Not saying that films shouldn't make a profit – they should, obviously – but any time something comes out of Disney with an anti-consumerist message it's hard not to take it with several shovels of salt.
Side note, I was amazed that Avatar is the most-liked film on Facebook but the more I think about it, the more it is a very “Facebook” film. Facebook uncoincidentally seems to me to be the platform most maligned in the West – abandoned by everyone except oversharing uncles and Boomers – but generally accepted as a normal fact of life in the rest of the world (at least where it's not banned). I haven't looked this up because it's 08:30 in the morning but I wonder if it has the most geographically dispersed userbase out of all the big platforms..?
+1 to your first point. It's a doomed film in that sense. You need a conglomerate to create THE epic but then you also cannot earnestly sustain the consequences that come with it (it reminds me a bit of the Severance vs Apple TV+ tension).
Haha I'm so glad you caught that because this was my intention with the Facebook Page reference. I work on social where we have plenty of data to support your argument. If we want to run ads anywhere that's not the Europe/North America/Australia, Facebook is an incredible platform to reach people in non-Western regions like Vietnam and Indonesia. Facebook is still insanely massive across the globe, we just don't "feel" it because there's been a vibe shift in where we live.
Sophie, there is a very unserious Avatar piece sitting in my drafts right now and I'm trying to discern if this is a sign to post it or just let the discussion finally die lol. If you see it, just know it was your essay that pushed me over the edge. Loved reading as always!
This is brilliant! That whole Papyrus font thing from SNL really does stick in peoples minds more than anything from the actual movies lol. Your point about how we mesure cultural impact being totally westernized hit hard, like we dismiss billions in global box office as "just spectacle" while obsessing over whether Brooklyn hipsters made memes. Really apreciate you putting in the work to challeng this tired narrative!
I liked your article very much. Yep, I read this whole thing. I think people have an agenda in fighting against this movie; in saying it does not have a cultural impact, they are motivated by other things. They don't see the forest for the trees. Avatar might not have sparked the influences, but it reinforces many. The incorporation of evil against the nature of good, a universal consciousness, and the idea that you can become something or someone completely different through technology are cornerstones of the movie. It's all of our main conversations of today, and people might not remember the names of the characters or planets, but they remember the story. They can tell you what happened in the movie and what the "blue people" are fighting for and against. The message of Avatar is kind of everywhere. Its themes are embedded; they are not the sparks but the pillars.
Sophie, you’re going to make me watch the movie I walked out of in 2009, aren’t you? Thank you for your footnote, now I feel better about walking out of it but also I am ashamed for not seeing its importance for the rest of the world. Something indeed is wrong with us but thanks to substack we can all commiserate together.
Girl, same!!! Don't feel bad that you walked out of it at all 🤣 Also nothing to be ashamed of --- this newsletter is trying to open up these conversations while providing some comic relief. Culture is so vast and complex. Also thank you so much supporting this newsletter with a subscription, it means the world!!
It’s definitely one of my fav substacks! I find your writing to be so refreshing when it comes to film. And of course! Gotta support especially when I am wanting to read more articles/posts like this!
You've proved the Avatar films have had a cultural impact in this piece, but I confess I've not wasted any thought on whether they have or not as I really couldn't give an airborne fornication. I find the Avatar films interminable for reasons that are extremely well-documented, and I miss the time when I used to eagerly anticipate every James Cameron release (I remember 14-year-old me all but foaming at the mouth as I queued to see The Abyss when it opened in UK cinemas - even though I was one of very few who saw that one).
Great article. Avatar has always had some interesting appeal. While I am not a huge avatar person, I think most of what is appreciated is the spectacle of it. Personally, I have always made the "lack of cultural impact" argument, usually stating their lack of merchandise and conversational presence as the basis. But fans of the series seem to have this tendency to buy a ticket, buy the home released film and then quietly disappear into other media for a few years. It's odd in that, it's against the norms considering how much money it makes. I've never heard anyone tell me it their favorite movie or series (that's anecdotal) but on the other side, people will clearly tell me they like Star Wars or LOTR.
Thanks so much for this perspective Erik - and yes absolutely, this feels quite intuitive for most people which is why it's a position I didn't want to dismiss. It's fascinating to see how cultural impact is perceived or how we perceive it based on all the factors outlined in the essay. Thank you for stopping by!
I'd also be interested in reading the essay that your own argument displaced and complicated. Specifically, why Cameron's white savior complex films appear to have taken root across post colonial cultures and subaltern peoples. From my perspective, that's the real paradox.
yeah it's definitely a very interesting topic to tackle! Truthfully, I just don't know if I have the energy/scope for it but I would absolutely love to read your perspective if you decide to write about it
BRILLIANT article. Best one I've ever seen about this Avatar discourse point. I've also been a vocal public caretaker of this discourse, pushing back on every "Avatar has no cultural impact" nonsense post that popped up over the past fifteen years. I have been a devout Cameron apologist. I had my knives sharpened for all the post Fire & Ash debate...
But while I haven't gone native, I have to admit that I can no longer deny that the nonsense posters have a bit of a point.
First, I'll push back a tiny bit on your ultimate conclusion that Avatar HAS had cultural impact, just globally, not here in North American pop culture. While that's 100% accurate, it's also incredibly irrelevant, bordering on disingenuous for the purposes of this discussion. When you have to redefine what constitutes 'cultural impact' that merely proves the initial point. For all the metrics I use to define 'cultural impact', I use North American pop culture. I don't have a CLUE how any other franchise resonates outside of our half of our hemisphere. I don't care. I don't care about any movie that might have done a billion dollars in China. For all I know, Asian cultures consider (checks notes) "Ne Zha 2" the most impactful film of a generation. It's not even a grainy frame grab of a blip on the fringes of my radar, and I'll wager, 99% of Western audiences. So for the purposes of the Avatar discourse, the rest of the world doesn't matter except on the literal bottom line. The box office numbers they contribute to this discussion are the ONLY fractional Venn diagram overlap with us.
Secondly, 1000% nodding my head to every other point and example you illustrated in your article. Your points about why the characters aren't as easily and widely accessible for fan content is spot on and the first time I've seen it spelled out like that.
I'll add a few points or observations.
I don't know that James Cameron actually has to do any work to prevent Avatar fan fiction or other usage of his IP. I think it's entirely that no one is inspired to create any. Not that Avatar is just too derivative or poorly-written or that the characters are disinteresting, but because Cameron created a story that is truly entirely self-contained. The first movie ended with as definitive of a "And they lived happily ever after" as a sci-fi colonization battle film could have. Jake was brought back to life in his permanent Avatar body. The treehouse was saved (or was it? I don't remember... did it burn and they started a new one? See?) In the end, all the usual nerd questions had been answered. There was no pathway for speculation and argument. What plot points were ripe for nerd fights? "Banshees would be cool to ride on!" "Yeah! I agree!" "Okay... So... uh, do you think Boba Fett is still alive?" "WHAT? He got digested in the Sarlacc Pit! No way he could survive that!" "You're nuts! it takes a thousand years to digest! Are you saying his Mandalorian armor couldn't keep him safe long enough to escape from the Sarlacc??"
There was just nowhere for the story to go unless you were in the writer's room with James Cameron working on the sequels. He'd built zero What-Ifs into the story. All of the thought experiments for normies consisted of imagining what it would be like to live on Pandora. That's kinda it. It would be neat. No argument there.
Avatar hit right when social media was really first emerging. I often wonder if Avatar had come out a decade earlier if the way culture was consumed 'back then' might have led to a more traditional incorporation into pop culture? I still doubt it simply because the Avatar story ecosystem was an enclosed self-contained environment. You had all you needed within the confines of the movie itself.
So Way of Water came out amidst all the "no cultural impact" meme-ish posts. I defended it vociferously. I wasn't as bullish on the movie itself as I was the first Avatar. In fact, in the leadup to Way of Water's release, I went to a re-release of the first movie and was blown away again at how enjoyable the experience of watching the movie was. But... the movie was like a 6.5 or a 7 for me. It was a'ight. However, I was really excited for Fire and Ash and the rest of the sequels. It seemed like we finally had a world that was fertile ground for endless new stories, and expanding the world and letting the kids all grow into being the leaders of this franchise.
And then... and then I SAW Fire and Ash...
It was beautiful and visually mesmerizing. Unparalleled, really. I suppose they technically CAN make it more realistic and immersive and indistinguishable from reality, but the advances that can potentially be made are likely imperceptible to me or 99% of the audience. The problem with Fire and Ash is that the story went NOWHERE. I see tons of posts and articles complaining that this movie was just a rehash or cut-and-paste of the first two movies. And I can't argue with that. Most of the defenders of this story complaint say, "Uh, the whales still exist in this world, of course, they are going to be part of the big battle." While, sure, that makes logical sense, kind of, it is almost a BETRAYAL of what James Cameron has done in all his movies, especially the first two Avatar films, which is take us somewhere totally new and show us something we've never seen before.
Early in the film, we got the cool floating balloon wind tribe of Na'vi. And in theory we were going to go to the FIRE part of Pandora. It was going to be all volcanoes and heat and a different culture and on and on. Just like Way of Water gave us the water tribe, whatever they are called. But the last two-thirds of this movie took place... on the water. With whales. With an armada of human ships again skimming across the water to Find Jake Sully! Sully children getting into and out of danger over and over again. Neytiri grousing about Spider and humans. Eywa again having to be begged and shamed into helping her people fight off the human invaders. All the animals that had been trying to kill our heroes throughout the film were now suddenly the vanguard of the surprise last-second defense. And you better believe that we're going to see banshees grab ships out of the sky with their claws and fling them out of control. You better believe that a warrior riding a banshee will fly right up on a soldier shooting a gun from the opening of his ship and grab that soldier and rip him out of the ship before screeching in triumph and flying away. Will Na'vi arrows pierce earth's propellor system and cause an explosion and that ship will crash into another larger ship? More than once! (at least it felt that way).
By the end of Fire and Ash, I felt like I'd seen all the Avatar universe had to offer. It felt entirely like we'd reached the END of the story again. There were no story points I was speculating on when I was walking out of the theater. No theories I was inspired to search on YouTube to see what others were thinking. I suppose there's more story, but it felt like everyone had a happy ending and that we were done. Again.
James Cameron had more than THREE HOURS to expand the world of Avatar. Instead, we spent two hours in the same environments, giving. us slight variations of the same story beats from the first two movies. That tells me he is DONE. Those are all the ideas he has for this franchise. I have ZERO confidence that the next three hours will NOW give us all the cool new stuff we were hoping for.
I walked out of Fire and Ash never wanting to see another Avatar film. Further, I was done with ALL spectacle movies of that scale. Fire and Ash had done it. It had given us every possible example of this type of film. Pandora is a real place. There will be no movie that will ever challenge it. It'll be foolish for anyone to try. We've seen as photo-realistic an example of every kind of alien creature, on land, sea and air, fighting against cool military tech. I'll never see cooler examples of giant alien whales engaging with futuristic aircraft carriers. It can't be topped. I even saw all of this amazing stuff in the best possible 3D that's ever been put on screen. There's nowhere else for this tech to go. There's nowhere else for this STORY to go unless the Na'vi or the Sully family chooses to take the battle to Earth. But I don't think that's what Cameron has in mind. I'm guessing his next big reveal for Pandora are... other islands. And I bet the human military will return, looking to get that durn Jake Sully and his family!
Cameron had a chance to do with Fire and Ash what he did with all of his previous sequels, which is give us some of the all-time great continuations of a story and expansion in mind-blowing ways. Aliens is arguably better than the masterpiece it is a sequel to. T2 is exponentially better in every way that Terminator was great. No one has ever been better at mining diamonds from a gold mine... until Fire and Ash. This was the first time he just spun his wheels. I don't think he has anything new left to say in this universe. He's been laying the groundwork for months that this movie might be the last one in the series unless it makes enough money. It's making MORE than enough money to justify all the remaining planned sequels. But I think Cameron is looking for an off-ramp. He just keeps talking about it, and mentioning the other films he wants to do. That's where his passion is at. He THOUGHT Avatar would allow him to tell all the kinds of stories he would ever want to tell, but I think he realizes that he's hit a wall, and that the ideas of Ghosts of Hiroshima can't be set on Pandora. Ghosts of Hiroshima clearly excites him in a way that Avatar hasn't lately. Maybe he'll let other filmmakers finish Avatar 4 and 5, but I think he's tired talking about it in any capacity. If two more movies come out, he'll be on the same talk circuit having to opine endlessly about shooting in water tanks, how motion capture works, the environmental themes of the movies, etc etc etc. He has to be utterly bored with those discussions after three movies. Two more movies will just be the exact same, but with incremental differences at best.
While I will never say that the Avatar films had no cultural impact, I will acknowledge that they are more cultural markers on the timeline of entertainment history. Their impact is all around us, but invisible unless we go actively looking for those markers.
"Hey... remember Avatar?"
"Oh yeah. That was the blue-skinned people that rode flying dragons! Yeah, that was cool. Anyway, so who do you think Grogu's mysterious Jedi master is going to turn out to be?"
One thing that popped for me was your context of seeing the film during the "family vacation on Crete" but that "things were tight" so it felt special. That generated some cognitive dissonance for me, because how many folks can have a family vacation on Crete and claim times are tight? I don't intend to be mean, it just came off weird. It pointed to one of the main mis-connections Avatar has with Western culture (more accurately the American mythos dominated culture after WWII), or reversing the perspective, that cultures who have more current and historic experience and memory of slavery, poverty, colonialism, invasion, war etc. probably have more resonance with the film(s) than our* cushy selves. Just wanted to point out that you're trying to see something that's probably difficult to grok, though not impossible.
*I'm Native American but raised off the Res where my mom grew up, so significantly acculturated. There's a whole generation of us for whom Avatar was a reminder of what we lost. Yes, white savior was an annoying thing, but the Na'vi culture existed outside of that in the film's context. It triggered me to finding a pathway back into my culture.
Appreciate your comment. You may not have been a long-term reader of mine and not knowing my backstory but my family is from Crete. My grandparents lived there so when I said “family vacation”, I meant that we'd go to stay at my grandparents (go on a boat from Athens to Crete). So this wasn't a fancy resort vacation - it was visiting family once a year.
Thank you, I wondered if there was more context, which hits very different. You might consider if you're looking for audience expansion, not depending on folks reading all your previous posts right away. I also get that you don't want to review your entire backstory every episode, that's too much exposition.
It sounds like a regular (?) visit with family...which is very different from a "family vacation" in the commodious world we live in, so just calling it what it is might give a different impression of your observations. Just a thought.
Even within a specifically intra-Anglosphere framework, Luke Y. Thompson has demonstrated that Avatar had a big impact on American animated family films of the 2010s.
"So what about the rip-offs? They've taken a long time, too, but we are also finally seeing the influence of Avatar in other movies. It's just that most of them happen to be animated. Trolls ($339 million worldwide), Moana ($574 million international), and the upcoming Smurfs reboot (TBD, but the prior two Smurfs movies combined did over $900 million) all feature sequences in which the characters discover a secret world where everything is bio-luminescent, and populated by strange, glowing creatures that blur the line between plant and animal. Pandora's box, so to speak, has entered the animator's toolbox. Trolls has been in the works since 2010, though the current incarnation of it supposedly began around 2013, a year before the Avatar theme park began construction. Smurfs: The Lost Village was announced as a fully animated film in 2014 (having presumably been in development long before, but not necessarily as a reboot), but the genesis of Moana happened earlier than all of them, in 2011. Considering most of Avatar's traction happened in 2010, that's not being especially slow on the uptake - just slow like all quality animated movies are."
I would add that Luc Besson's Valerian and the City of 1000 Planets was conceived as a kind of Avatar imitator (not in terms of plot or character, but Besson has said that he didn't think special effects had advanced enough to make the movie possible until he saw Avatar).
Partly, an appreciation of Avatar requires a modicum of maturity and patience. Maturity in that there are social frictions against expressions of delight in beauty and biological wonder, which is the key avenue of appreciation of Avatar. Patience is required because there are plenty of topics to debate and discuss, but even the movie gives those options little attention. I'm thinking of the distinction of Na'vi physiology compared to the rest of Pandora, why it is that humans are so accommodated to it, the tension between Jake's familocentric vs Neytiri's tribal social order, to say nothing of the religious tension, and other little wrinkles. Many of those things will require slow ponderous thoughts, made stickier with the colonial/white savior angles, that won't register in the wider populous until much later (if at all).
Anyway, I enjoyed this and will read anything on Avatar, ponderous or silly.
Yes that's a great point actually!!
2009 Avatar is underrated quotable--I still think "They are mated before Eywa" anytime I pass a public wedding or can't separate two pieces of cheese stuck together in the package.
hahahhahaha FACTS
Loved this piece!
"The Na'vi plug their hair-tentacle things directly into animals and trees because belonging matters more than owning. So when you try to mass-produce millions of plastic action figures based on characters who represent anti-consumerist values, you've created this bizarre ouroboros of hypocrisy that even the most devoted fan can feel in their bones."
More than that, even making this film through the studio system as James Cameron and raking in a few billion dollars seems contradictory somehow. Not saying that films shouldn't make a profit – they should, obviously – but any time something comes out of Disney with an anti-consumerist message it's hard not to take it with several shovels of salt.
Side note, I was amazed that Avatar is the most-liked film on Facebook but the more I think about it, the more it is a very “Facebook” film. Facebook uncoincidentally seems to me to be the platform most maligned in the West – abandoned by everyone except oversharing uncles and Boomers – but generally accepted as a normal fact of life in the rest of the world (at least where it's not banned). I haven't looked this up because it's 08:30 in the morning but I wonder if it has the most geographically dispersed userbase out of all the big platforms..?
+1 to your first point. It's a doomed film in that sense. You need a conglomerate to create THE epic but then you also cannot earnestly sustain the consequences that come with it (it reminds me a bit of the Severance vs Apple TV+ tension).
Haha I'm so glad you caught that because this was my intention with the Facebook Page reference. I work on social where we have plenty of data to support your argument. If we want to run ads anywhere that's not the Europe/North America/Australia, Facebook is an incredible platform to reach people in non-Western regions like Vietnam and Indonesia. Facebook is still insanely massive across the globe, we just don't "feel" it because there's been a vibe shift in where we live.
Also, a quick Google to your question points to distribution numbers like this so I say, yes, it's very likely so! https://www.giraffesocialmedia.co.uk/facebook-demographics-a-visual-guide-to-who-is-still-using-facebook-infographic/#:~:text=Regional%20Reach,lifestyle%20pages%20are%20particularly%20popular.
Sophie, there is a very unserious Avatar piece sitting in my drafts right now and I'm trying to discern if this is a sign to post it or just let the discussion finally die lol. If you see it, just know it was your essay that pushed me over the edge. Loved reading as always!
Ha!! Release the Avatar files I say 😂
This is brilliant! That whole Papyrus font thing from SNL really does stick in peoples minds more than anything from the actual movies lol. Your point about how we mesure cultural impact being totally westernized hit hard, like we dismiss billions in global box office as "just spectacle" while obsessing over whether Brooklyn hipsters made memes. Really apreciate you putting in the work to challeng this tired narrative!
Aw my pleasure 💕
I liked your article very much. Yep, I read this whole thing. I think people have an agenda in fighting against this movie; in saying it does not have a cultural impact, they are motivated by other things. They don't see the forest for the trees. Avatar might not have sparked the influences, but it reinforces many. The incorporation of evil against the nature of good, a universal consciousness, and the idea that you can become something or someone completely different through technology are cornerstones of the movie. It's all of our main conversations of today, and people might not remember the names of the characters or planets, but they remember the story. They can tell you what happened in the movie and what the "blue people" are fighting for and against. The message of Avatar is kind of everywhere. Its themes are embedded; they are not the sparks but the pillars.
Such a good point ✨ And thank you!!
Sophie, you’re going to make me watch the movie I walked out of in 2009, aren’t you? Thank you for your footnote, now I feel better about walking out of it but also I am ashamed for not seeing its importance for the rest of the world. Something indeed is wrong with us but thanks to substack we can all commiserate together.
Girl, same!!! Don't feel bad that you walked out of it at all 🤣 Also nothing to be ashamed of --- this newsletter is trying to open up these conversations while providing some comic relief. Culture is so vast and complex. Also thank you so much supporting this newsletter with a subscription, it means the world!!
It’s definitely one of my fav substacks! I find your writing to be so refreshing when it comes to film. And of course! Gotta support especially when I am wanting to read more articles/posts like this!
This was a fantastic and fascinating analysis.
Thank you Matt 🥹🥹🥹
You've proved the Avatar films have had a cultural impact in this piece, but I confess I've not wasted any thought on whether they have or not as I really couldn't give an airborne fornication. I find the Avatar films interminable for reasons that are extremely well-documented, and I miss the time when I used to eagerly anticipate every James Cameron release (I remember 14-year-old me all but foaming at the mouth as I queued to see The Abyss when it opened in UK cinemas - even though I was one of very few who saw that one).
Here's a sample of my thoughts on Avatar (if you're interested): https://simondillon.substack.com/p/film-review-avatar-fire-and-ash
totally fair perspective and honestly, I'm in your camp! loved your review too
Thank you. :)
Great article. Avatar has always had some interesting appeal. While I am not a huge avatar person, I think most of what is appreciated is the spectacle of it. Personally, I have always made the "lack of cultural impact" argument, usually stating their lack of merchandise and conversational presence as the basis. But fans of the series seem to have this tendency to buy a ticket, buy the home released film and then quietly disappear into other media for a few years. It's odd in that, it's against the norms considering how much money it makes. I've never heard anyone tell me it their favorite movie or series (that's anecdotal) but on the other side, people will clearly tell me they like Star Wars or LOTR.
Thanks so much for this perspective Erik - and yes absolutely, this feels quite intuitive for most people which is why it's a position I didn't want to dismiss. It's fascinating to see how cultural impact is perceived or how we perceive it based on all the factors outlined in the essay. Thank you for stopping by!
I'd also be interested in reading the essay that your own argument displaced and complicated. Specifically, why Cameron's white savior complex films appear to have taken root across post colonial cultures and subaltern peoples. From my perspective, that's the real paradox.
yeah it's definitely a very interesting topic to tackle! Truthfully, I just don't know if I have the energy/scope for it but I would absolutely love to read your perspective if you decide to write about it
Thank you Sophie, but I'd just get all tangled up in blue too.
BRILLIANT article. Best one I've ever seen about this Avatar discourse point. I've also been a vocal public caretaker of this discourse, pushing back on every "Avatar has no cultural impact" nonsense post that popped up over the past fifteen years. I have been a devout Cameron apologist. I had my knives sharpened for all the post Fire & Ash debate...
But while I haven't gone native, I have to admit that I can no longer deny that the nonsense posters have a bit of a point.
First, I'll push back a tiny bit on your ultimate conclusion that Avatar HAS had cultural impact, just globally, not here in North American pop culture. While that's 100% accurate, it's also incredibly irrelevant, bordering on disingenuous for the purposes of this discussion. When you have to redefine what constitutes 'cultural impact' that merely proves the initial point. For all the metrics I use to define 'cultural impact', I use North American pop culture. I don't have a CLUE how any other franchise resonates outside of our half of our hemisphere. I don't care. I don't care about any movie that might have done a billion dollars in China. For all I know, Asian cultures consider (checks notes) "Ne Zha 2" the most impactful film of a generation. It's not even a grainy frame grab of a blip on the fringes of my radar, and I'll wager, 99% of Western audiences. So for the purposes of the Avatar discourse, the rest of the world doesn't matter except on the literal bottom line. The box office numbers they contribute to this discussion are the ONLY fractional Venn diagram overlap with us.
Secondly, 1000% nodding my head to every other point and example you illustrated in your article. Your points about why the characters aren't as easily and widely accessible for fan content is spot on and the first time I've seen it spelled out like that.
I'll add a few points or observations.
I don't know that James Cameron actually has to do any work to prevent Avatar fan fiction or other usage of his IP. I think it's entirely that no one is inspired to create any. Not that Avatar is just too derivative or poorly-written or that the characters are disinteresting, but because Cameron created a story that is truly entirely self-contained. The first movie ended with as definitive of a "And they lived happily ever after" as a sci-fi colonization battle film could have. Jake was brought back to life in his permanent Avatar body. The treehouse was saved (or was it? I don't remember... did it burn and they started a new one? See?) In the end, all the usual nerd questions had been answered. There was no pathway for speculation and argument. What plot points were ripe for nerd fights? "Banshees would be cool to ride on!" "Yeah! I agree!" "Okay... So... uh, do you think Boba Fett is still alive?" "WHAT? He got digested in the Sarlacc Pit! No way he could survive that!" "You're nuts! it takes a thousand years to digest! Are you saying his Mandalorian armor couldn't keep him safe long enough to escape from the Sarlacc??"
There was just nowhere for the story to go unless you were in the writer's room with James Cameron working on the sequels. He'd built zero What-Ifs into the story. All of the thought experiments for normies consisted of imagining what it would be like to live on Pandora. That's kinda it. It would be neat. No argument there.
Avatar hit right when social media was really first emerging. I often wonder if Avatar had come out a decade earlier if the way culture was consumed 'back then' might have led to a more traditional incorporation into pop culture? I still doubt it simply because the Avatar story ecosystem was an enclosed self-contained environment. You had all you needed within the confines of the movie itself.
So Way of Water came out amidst all the "no cultural impact" meme-ish posts. I defended it vociferously. I wasn't as bullish on the movie itself as I was the first Avatar. In fact, in the leadup to Way of Water's release, I went to a re-release of the first movie and was blown away again at how enjoyable the experience of watching the movie was. But... the movie was like a 6.5 or a 7 for me. It was a'ight. However, I was really excited for Fire and Ash and the rest of the sequels. It seemed like we finally had a world that was fertile ground for endless new stories, and expanding the world and letting the kids all grow into being the leaders of this franchise.
And then... and then I SAW Fire and Ash...
It was beautiful and visually mesmerizing. Unparalleled, really. I suppose they technically CAN make it more realistic and immersive and indistinguishable from reality, but the advances that can potentially be made are likely imperceptible to me or 99% of the audience. The problem with Fire and Ash is that the story went NOWHERE. I see tons of posts and articles complaining that this movie was just a rehash or cut-and-paste of the first two movies. And I can't argue with that. Most of the defenders of this story complaint say, "Uh, the whales still exist in this world, of course, they are going to be part of the big battle." While, sure, that makes logical sense, kind of, it is almost a BETRAYAL of what James Cameron has done in all his movies, especially the first two Avatar films, which is take us somewhere totally new and show us something we've never seen before.
Early in the film, we got the cool floating balloon wind tribe of Na'vi. And in theory we were going to go to the FIRE part of Pandora. It was going to be all volcanoes and heat and a different culture and on and on. Just like Way of Water gave us the water tribe, whatever they are called. But the last two-thirds of this movie took place... on the water. With whales. With an armada of human ships again skimming across the water to Find Jake Sully! Sully children getting into and out of danger over and over again. Neytiri grousing about Spider and humans. Eywa again having to be begged and shamed into helping her people fight off the human invaders. All the animals that had been trying to kill our heroes throughout the film were now suddenly the vanguard of the surprise last-second defense. And you better believe that we're going to see banshees grab ships out of the sky with their claws and fling them out of control. You better believe that a warrior riding a banshee will fly right up on a soldier shooting a gun from the opening of his ship and grab that soldier and rip him out of the ship before screeching in triumph and flying away. Will Na'vi arrows pierce earth's propellor system and cause an explosion and that ship will crash into another larger ship? More than once! (at least it felt that way).
By the end of Fire and Ash, I felt like I'd seen all the Avatar universe had to offer. It felt entirely like we'd reached the END of the story again. There were no story points I was speculating on when I was walking out of the theater. No theories I was inspired to search on YouTube to see what others were thinking. I suppose there's more story, but it felt like everyone had a happy ending and that we were done. Again.
James Cameron had more than THREE HOURS to expand the world of Avatar. Instead, we spent two hours in the same environments, giving. us slight variations of the same story beats from the first two movies. That tells me he is DONE. Those are all the ideas he has for this franchise. I have ZERO confidence that the next three hours will NOW give us all the cool new stuff we were hoping for.
I walked out of Fire and Ash never wanting to see another Avatar film. Further, I was done with ALL spectacle movies of that scale. Fire and Ash had done it. It had given us every possible example of this type of film. Pandora is a real place. There will be no movie that will ever challenge it. It'll be foolish for anyone to try. We've seen as photo-realistic an example of every kind of alien creature, on land, sea and air, fighting against cool military tech. I'll never see cooler examples of giant alien whales engaging with futuristic aircraft carriers. It can't be topped. I even saw all of this amazing stuff in the best possible 3D that's ever been put on screen. There's nowhere else for this tech to go. There's nowhere else for this STORY to go unless the Na'vi or the Sully family chooses to take the battle to Earth. But I don't think that's what Cameron has in mind. I'm guessing his next big reveal for Pandora are... other islands. And I bet the human military will return, looking to get that durn Jake Sully and his family!
Cameron had a chance to do with Fire and Ash what he did with all of his previous sequels, which is give us some of the all-time great continuations of a story and expansion in mind-blowing ways. Aliens is arguably better than the masterpiece it is a sequel to. T2 is exponentially better in every way that Terminator was great. No one has ever been better at mining diamonds from a gold mine... until Fire and Ash. This was the first time he just spun his wheels. I don't think he has anything new left to say in this universe. He's been laying the groundwork for months that this movie might be the last one in the series unless it makes enough money. It's making MORE than enough money to justify all the remaining planned sequels. But I think Cameron is looking for an off-ramp. He just keeps talking about it, and mentioning the other films he wants to do. That's where his passion is at. He THOUGHT Avatar would allow him to tell all the kinds of stories he would ever want to tell, but I think he realizes that he's hit a wall, and that the ideas of Ghosts of Hiroshima can't be set on Pandora. Ghosts of Hiroshima clearly excites him in a way that Avatar hasn't lately. Maybe he'll let other filmmakers finish Avatar 4 and 5, but I think he's tired talking about it in any capacity. If two more movies come out, he'll be on the same talk circuit having to opine endlessly about shooting in water tanks, how motion capture works, the environmental themes of the movies, etc etc etc. He has to be utterly bored with those discussions after three movies. Two more movies will just be the exact same, but with incremental differences at best.
While I will never say that the Avatar films had no cultural impact, I will acknowledge that they are more cultural markers on the timeline of entertainment history. Their impact is all around us, but invisible unless we go actively looking for those markers.
"Hey... remember Avatar?"
"Oh yeah. That was the blue-skinned people that rode flying dragons! Yeah, that was cool. Anyway, so who do you think Grogu's mysterious Jedi master is going to turn out to be?"
One thing that popped for me was your context of seeing the film during the "family vacation on Crete" but that "things were tight" so it felt special. That generated some cognitive dissonance for me, because how many folks can have a family vacation on Crete and claim times are tight? I don't intend to be mean, it just came off weird. It pointed to one of the main mis-connections Avatar has with Western culture (more accurately the American mythos dominated culture after WWII), or reversing the perspective, that cultures who have more current and historic experience and memory of slavery, poverty, colonialism, invasion, war etc. probably have more resonance with the film(s) than our* cushy selves. Just wanted to point out that you're trying to see something that's probably difficult to grok, though not impossible.
*I'm Native American but raised off the Res where my mom grew up, so significantly acculturated. There's a whole generation of us for whom Avatar was a reminder of what we lost. Yes, white savior was an annoying thing, but the Na'vi culture existed outside of that in the film's context. It triggered me to finding a pathway back into my culture.
Appreciate your comment. You may not have been a long-term reader of mine and not knowing my backstory but my family is from Crete. My grandparents lived there so when I said “family vacation”, I meant that we'd go to stay at my grandparents (go on a boat from Athens to Crete). So this wasn't a fancy resort vacation - it was visiting family once a year.
Thank you, I wondered if there was more context, which hits very different. You might consider if you're looking for audience expansion, not depending on folks reading all your previous posts right away. I also get that you don't want to review your entire backstory every episode, that's too much exposition.
It sounds like a regular (?) visit with family...which is very different from a "family vacation" in the commodious world we live in, so just calling it what it is might give a different impression of your observations. Just a thought.
Even within a specifically intra-Anglosphere framework, Luke Y. Thompson has demonstrated that Avatar had a big impact on American animated family films of the 2010s.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170224115737/https://www.forbes.com/sites/lukethompson/2017/02/21/eight-years-on-avatar-is-finally-having-a-cultural-impact/#1e9bd6165058
"So what about the rip-offs? They've taken a long time, too, but we are also finally seeing the influence of Avatar in other movies. It's just that most of them happen to be animated. Trolls ($339 million worldwide), Moana ($574 million international), and the upcoming Smurfs reboot (TBD, but the prior two Smurfs movies combined did over $900 million) all feature sequences in which the characters discover a secret world where everything is bio-luminescent, and populated by strange, glowing creatures that blur the line between plant and animal. Pandora's box, so to speak, has entered the animator's toolbox. Trolls has been in the works since 2010, though the current incarnation of it supposedly began around 2013, a year before the Avatar theme park began construction. Smurfs: The Lost Village was announced as a fully animated film in 2014 (having presumably been in development long before, but not necessarily as a reboot), but the genesis of Moana happened earlier than all of them, in 2011. Considering most of Avatar's traction happened in 2010, that's not being especially slow on the uptake - just slow like all quality animated movies are."
I would add that Luc Besson's Valerian and the City of 1000 Planets was conceived as a kind of Avatar imitator (not in terms of plot or character, but Besson has said that he didn't think special effects had advanced enough to make the movie possible until he saw Avatar).
Amazing read, I always wondered why the Avatar films do so well so 'silently' thanks for the insight.
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