Avatar Estimated Budget: Estimates are likely all we're ever going to get, and even those estimates won't be commented on by 20th Century Fox. Estimates on the cost to shoot
Avatar range from $200 million (the number the studio seems to not shy away from) to $300 million (
The Hollywood Reporter) to $310 million (
Los Angeles Times). Adding in marketing costs, it's estimated the studio needs to bring in $750 million in order to make back its money.
Shooting Dates: April 2007 to December 2007
Shooting Locations:
Kauai, Hawaii, Los Angeles, California, New Zealand and Oahu, Hawaii
Release Date: December 18, 2009
Opening Weekend Box Office: Avatar opened to
$77 million domestically with a $242.5 million worldwide gross.
Avatar Production Facts and Trivia
James Cameron conceived the idea of Avatar back when he was working on Titanic, but the technology wasn't available then to bring his vision to life on the screen. Cameron wrote Avatar in 1995 but had no way - at that time - to create the characters he envisioned and shelved the project until 2005. In '05 Cameron, along with Vince Pace, invented new ways of capturing the performances of actors.
Cameron and his team developed a brand new image-based facial performance capture system which utilizes a head-rig camera and is able to record even the tiniest of facial movements. More importantly, it can capture a performer's eye movements, making the dead-eye look of performance capture films a thing of the past.
The big question surrounding Avatar is are the avatars CG creations or actors? According to Fox's press notes, the visual effects house charged with working on the characters, plants and wildlife of Pandora - Peter Jackson's WETA Digital - believes they're animated. Cameron doesn't agree. The studio says they're both correct. The actors performed their roles and then animators used those performances to make the avatars look life-like on the screen. No performances were embellished, and WETA Digital made the avatars do exactly what the actors did during the performance capture sessions.
Cameron swears he's not trying to replace flesh and blood actors with CG characters, but instead is empowering them and letting them express themselves in new ways. "I don't want to replace actors; I love working with actors. It's what I do, as a director," explained Cameron. "What we're trying to replace is the five hours in the makeup chair, which is how you used to create characters like aliens, werewolves, witches, demons and so on. Now you can be whoever or whatever you want, at any age, even change gender, and without the time and discomfort of complex makeup."
Avatar was shot in stereoscopic 3-D using the brand new Fusion Camera System, co-developed by Cameron and Pace. The Fusion Camera System took seven years to create and is now the most advanced system of its kind.
The story takes place on the planet Pandora. Pandora is, according to Fox's production notes, "a moon with an Earthlike environment that orbits a gas-giant planet called Polyphemus in the Alpha Centauri-A star system. At 4.4 light years away, Alpha Centauri is our nearest stellar neighbor, and when it is discovered that Pandora is rich in a rare-earth mineral called Unobtainium, the race is on to mine the new world's resources."
Sam Worthington stars as the film's hero, Jake Sully, a disabled ex-Marine who helps save Pandora. Worthington had no idea what film he was auditioning for - or even who the director was - when he first was contacted about the project. Once he was hired, Worthington went through weapons training and special physical training to play Jake. However, Worthington says it was getting ready to play the role mentally that was ultimately the most important part of preparing for Avatar. "I didn't want my prep to be like boot camp," he says. "Anyone can do push-ups. I hung out with Jim [Cameron's] brother, John David, a former Marine," said Worthington. "To me it was more about capturing the way these Marines see the world - and how their training can make them think they're unstoppable."
Cameron reunites with his Aliens star Sigourney Weaver for Avatar, providing Weaver with yet another strong female character to inhabit. It's the first time the two have worked together since 1986, and Cameron admits he didn't initially think of Weaver when he was writing the role of scientist Dr Grace Augustine.
"I wasn't excluding her, I just wasn't thinking of it," said Cameron at the film's LA premiere. "There was a moment when I started casting the film and I was looking at other women to possibly play Grace Augustine and I just went back to the Sigourney idea. And I thought, 'You know what? It doesn't matter that we did another science fiction film together. She's such a strong actress, she's perfect for this part. Why wouldn't I cast her?' And then I got all excited about the idea and I called her up and sent her the script, and of course she jumped onboard because she's a very smart lady. She got the themes, the environmental themes of it, and she actually thought that it was a very worthwhile project, quite separately from it being a good character for her to play."
