It is well worth watching
There is a movie that was released globally at the end of 2009 and was a huge success. The director announced that the film will be made into a series, which will only take three years. In 2012, the director said the sequel would be released in late 2014. In 2015, the director said that a release in December 2017 was the goal, "The script is still being written, but the technical problems have been solved, and the stage and infrastructure are ready. So, we are really ready to start filming as soon as next year." "In 2017, the director once again apologized to the fans that it will not be released in 2018 because the shooting and production cycle is too long... Three years and three years later, "Avatar 2" will finally be released on December 16, 2022. .
Is the 13-year long wait worth it? The industry's answer will probably be handed over later. But yesterday, "Avatar 2" started pre-sales in mainland China. Whether it was the more than 2 million "want to watch" users on both Maoyan and Taopiaopiao platforms, or the performance of many expensive midnight shows on the 16th that were almost sold out, The answer seems to be: worth it.
That winter, it was hard to get a ticket
"Avatar" was released in North America on December 14, 2009 (and released in mainland China on January 4, 2010), through 3D virtual images The dreamy and magnificent Pandora planet created by photography and motion capture technology has almost redefined the "perfectly detailed and immersive" movie viewing experience. It not only triggered a phenomenon-level movie viewing craze around the world, but also dominated the world with a box office of nearly 3 billion US dollars. To date, it has won many awards including the Oscars for Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, and Best Visual Effects.
But in fact, the memory left to us by "Avatar" far exceeds the box office figures or the numerous awards. Do you still remember that winter, in the howling cold wind, there was an endless queue to buy tickets at the entrance of Hepingyingdu? The crowds of people could make a full circle around Raffles City along Hankou Road, Yunnan Middle Road, Fuzhou Road, and Tibet Middle Road . Even so, because it had the only IMAX giant screen in Shanghai at the time, 90% of the "Avatar" shows were sold out within 24 hours of the ticket opening, leaving only about 2,000 tickets left in the first three rows of the IMAX hall. Looking through historical photos, the theater also temporarily issued a "ticket purchase number" that was "void the next day". It can even be said that the astonishing box office of 168 million yuan achieved by 14 IMAX screens across the country that year (screen accounted for 0.23%, box office accounted for 12.2%) completely inspired the reform of my country's film production and theater audio-visual technology.
Being on top of the trend 13 years later
If we say that the combination of extraordinary technology and art in "Avatar" 13 years ago has brought the presentation and experience of movies into a new era. . So 13 years later, movie fans around the world are looking forward to the 68-year-old Cameron to start a new era.
In fact, behind this is more than a year and a half of experimentation and debugging. The difficulty of filming with a motion capture system underwater is not that it is underwater, but that the interface between air and water will form a "moving mirror". Such a "moving mirror" will reflect all the marked points, and then generate a large number of Wrong tag. In order to solve this problem, the team continued to experiment and innovatively tried various technologies, and finally was able to clearly capture the smallest movements and expressions of the actors underwater.
However, as the director who loves the ocean the most and probably knows the ocean best, this is not enough. What is not well known to young movie fans is that after filming "Titanic", Cameron almost "disappeared" for seven years from 1998 to 2005. This "full-time explorer" worked 16 hours a day with a group of scientist friends. , not only led the team to create another spherical cockpit with perfect welding and strong pressure-bearing capacity, but also finally independently drove it to dive into the world's deepest trench - the bottom of the Mariana Trench, nearly 11,000 meters above the horizon, becoming the third person in history The man who accomplished this feat. This time for the live shooting of "Avatar 2", he moved the planet Pandora to the Mariana Trench. During the filming, the crew built a special deep-sea submarine worth US$5 million to dive into the trench to conduct on-the-spot investigations for the underwater landscape design.
In addition, in order to let the audience feel the real Pandora planet, Cameron also invited astrophysicists, anthropologists, music professors and archaeologists to participate in the production of the film. They further used their professional knowledge to improve the fiction in the film. Elements, such as Pandora's atmospheric density, create three-note Na'vi music, and examine the history and social structure of the Na'vi people.
Even, Cameron even took his own life this time. In his opinion, the 3D craze during the screening of "Avatar" is outdated, and "Avatar 2" will become the world's first naked-eye 3D movie. Relying on the high frame rate to provide bright images, the new film will achieve the effect of watching 3D movies without the need for 3D glasses, presenting a wonderful world that is both real and imaginary to the world.
Of course, "Avatar 2" may not be able to carry such deep expectations from global movie fans and the Chinese market. After all, the production cost of a new film is extremely high, and it must earn at least more than 2 billion yuan at the box office and climb to the third or fourth place in the global film history list before it can make back the money; after all, Cameron said in a recent interview that if this film If it doesn't perform well at the box office, it's likely that he will end the series after "Avatar 3." But whether it is the legendary series that has been laid out for the fifth part, or it has come all the way from "Terminator", "Alien 2", "Abyss", "Terminator 2" and "Titanic", in the past 40 years, Cameron's movies have been The world's film industry has always taken the lead in innovation, making "Avatar 2" worth looking forward to this winter.