John Oliver jokes that no one cares about the Avatar sequels. Audiences cared deeply about the original Avatar, which to date has taken in a record $2.847 billion worldwide.
The first Avatar was indeed such a huge blockbuster that James Cameron announced immediately he would be making a sequel. But Cameron was forced to delay his plans as he worked out the technical challenges involved in shooting performance-capture underwater. Eventually Cameron sorted this out and got back to work, looking to shoot Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 back-to-back with tentative plans for Avatar 4 and Avatar 5 to follow. Indeed Avatar 2 was originally scheduled for release in December of 2020, but was pushed back a year to avoid competing with Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. The movie was then pushed back another year due to COVID.
Despite all these delays Cameron continues pushing forward shooting footage for all of his planned Avatar sequels. One person who isn’t at all impressed by Cameron’s persistence however is Oliver, host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight. In a segment on Sunday's show, Oliver made it clear just how not-interested he is in more Avatar while discussing the 2009 Climate Change Global Conference and its failure to deliver solutions on climate change issues. It just happens that Avatar came out in 2009 as well, and Oliver used this coincidence to help make his point (via IndieWire):
There are things it’s OK to take a decade on and not deliver on. The Avatar sequels, for instance. Take your time on those, James Cameron. No one gives a s--t…I will give anyone in this audience $1,000 right now if they remember either of these characters’ names.
An image of Avatar’s main characters Jake Sully and Neytiri was shown as Oliver offered his humorous challenge to the audience. Of course the question of Avatar’s relevance has been brought up many times over the past decade. Indeed, many have pointed out that despite the original movie’s huge box office success, it seems to have made little impact on pop culture as a whole. Certainly Avatar is nowhere near as huge as Star Wars or Marvel as a pop culture entity in the West in 2021. However, the movie does seem to still mean a lot in China, where it was recently re-released and made enough money to overtake The Avengers: Endgame as the all-time box office champion.
Avatar’s writer-director Cameron of course has been counted out many times in the past and somehow always manages to have the last laugh. Famously, Titanic was supposed to be a flop before it went on to become the biggest movie of all-time as of 1997. Avatar too was looked at as a potential folly before it surpassed even Titanic’s blockbuster performance. Perhaps Cameron has bitten off more than even he can chew by tackling four more Avatar movies at a time when the original film’s relevance seems to have largely faded away. But that will be up to audiences to decide. And if Cameron knows anything it's how to please an audience.
Source: Last Week Tonight (via IndieWire)
