I loved it. Beautiful to look at and I'm a sucker for epic conflict. Does anyone know if Cameron or the writer ever intended for there to be a sequel?

The story seems like it's set up for one. I was going to talk about it, but then I realized that I was basically describing Xenosaga, and figured it'd be wiser to stop. =(

I believe he mentioned he always wanted to do a second one if it was successful. I can't recall the exact quote though.

A trilogy is most likely to happen. This movie is doing really really well and he already has stories ready to work on for sequels. Another factor is that since he already has all the CG assets and equipment needed to make the next film it won't take anywhere near as long to make it.

The next movies are most likely to take place off of Pandora perhaps on other planets/moons/systems and supposedly still feature the same cast as they are very pumped to get on board again. There's also rumors of an extended director's cut of Avatar which features Earth scenes that apparently WETA had completed but Cameron cut out of release in order to keep the movie under 3 hours.

While all this excites me I am slightly disappointed because Cameron may or may not do the Battle Angel trilogy he put so much design work into. I'm hoping that filming the next two Avatar movies changes his mind and he figures out a good way to mix CG captured performance characters (ie Alita/Gally) into a mostly live action world.

Given that Battlefield Earth did a better job of tying up loose ends, there really should be a sequel.

We're going into sequel (and manual) territory here, so...

Canonically it takes six years to go from Earth to Pandora. So the natives will have twelve years to prepare.

I don't really see the nuking happening. RDA is a for-profit corporation, it behooves them to play nice by Earth space rules. Plus, they're on Pandora to mine their rare fuel source. Nuking it is a complete waste of resources and no stockholder will agree to that expedition.

I'd link to the official Pandorapedia, but it seems their links are broken at the moment.

Just came back after seeing it in IMAX 3D.. What can I say that already hasn't? I find it was worth the 17.50 for the ticket, and yeah... pretty fun experience

Yeah Cameron had plans for a trilogy if it did well and.. it's doing pretty damn insane at the box office and was well received with critics so expect it. I know he really wants to do Alita next and they even have a script and other pre-production work done already. However with the great response Avatar is getting he may change his mind and shift focus to the Avatar sequels.

Wow so Avatar has already crossed the billion mark worldwide and knocked down The Dark Knight as the 4th highest grossing film worldwide of all time in just 3 weeks. It looks like it REALLY might beat Titanic at this point. This movie is a beast and has some insanely strong legs. Made 68 million this weekend only dropping 7 million from last weekend. Sherlock is also doing well and we will most likely get a franchise out of it.

Hey, so. Unobtainium is the most retarded name for something ever.

Yeah, that really bothered me at first. It struck me as kind of pandering, but the more I thought about the movie as a whole, the more I think he really made it to be a family film. The soundtrack, visuals and visceral impact of everything was his way of making a film with universal appeal. He wanted people of all ages that saw it to immediately understand who the major players were and what their motives were.

I mean, he could still have come up with something like "lenticulum" but it might not be as transparent to youngsters.

Unobtainium is actually a term that's used jokingly in engineering to describe materials that are either rare and impossible to find, or flat-out non-existant. Cameron's cheeky use of it is pretty clever but it comes across poorly in the film. It's like they KNOW it's a ridiculous name so they play it off that way.

I know Unobtanium has been used in other movies as well. I think the machine they used in The Core was supposed to have been made out of it.

(I'm actually surprised Bender wasn't made out of Unobtainum at some point.)

In the original script (I don't have the link on me) unobtanium had a legitimate name, but was coined unobtanium because it was a pain to get. The name stuck.

I agree though, in the movie it just came off as somewhat ridiculous.

Script can be found here with Unobtainium intact, for anyone interested. This is the version being passed around for the Academy to read, so I'm sure it's the final draft:

http://www.foxscreenings.com/media/p...eronAVATAR.pdf

Here's the original scriptment to which I was referring: Avatar Scriptment by James Cameron

Summary of changes here: PROJECT 880: THE AVATAR THAT ALMOST WAS

I kinda thought unobtanium wasn't the real name in the movie, but just something all the workers called it for the heck of it.

I can honestly that sounds like a much better movie. When I said that I felt the film was dumbed down to make it more accessible to its PG-13 audience, it was changes like these that reflect it.

The spectacle wasn't taken out of the film...just the interesting parts. Like seeing Earth in the shitter, and implying that the Avatars they are piloting are actually conscious. More horrifying, but interesting. Doesn't have to be arty to be a bit less generic than the final script was.

Oh welly. Plus:

That would have been for some entertaining cinema methinks.

It's on the same level as literary great J.K. Rowling naming the character she shockingly reveals to be a werewolf three-quarters of the way through the book "Remus Lupin".

"Alright, like, so this stuff, it's like an element that's hard-to-get. Hard-to-get, hmm... almost like it's unobtaina- Hold on. I've got it."
- James Cameron, 2009

I'm reasonably sure it's a knowing nod to the engineering term rather than a really unoriginal stab at a name of something.

Doesn't really change my opinion of the inanity of the movie.

I only just read the thread and was going to post this if nobody else had. It's used jokingly in all sorts of contexts to describe that kind of material, often with the properties required for an exotic invention which don't exist in any genuine material.

TV Tropes uses it along with the terms "Phlebotinum" and "Narrativium" to characterise the phoney science often used in film and television scripts. It's the fake science version of "A Wizard Did It"

Unobtainium - Television Tropes & Idioms

So I don't know what to make of the use of it in Avatar, since usually a scriptwriter is expected to come up with his own term for unobtanium (see: Naquadah, Dilithium...) rather than just use the generic name.

Okay, so the scriptment says stuff about superconductivity at room temperature and whatever, but, I mean, it's not like the fantastic properties of unobtanium were used as a plot device, like in The Core. It could have been called Space Gold or Astro Oil or whatever and nothing would change; all that mattered was its monetary value.

I see that the scriptment's in-universe explanation of the term is that it started as a joke name and stuck, which is plausible, though not terribly clever.

EDIT: whoops quazi already said that

Well, floating mountains make more sense when you know that superconductors float in magnetic fields. So with a big magnetic field and lotsa unobtainium, the floating mountains aren't quite as absurd.

How about them waterfalls :33: