5 EVEN THE TRAILER BROKE RECORDS
November 1st, 2009 was a big, big sports day. Not only was it Game 4 of the World Series, there was also a key football game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Seattle Seahawks. The Cowboys were hosting at their six-month-old stadium in Arlington, Texas. The new stadium was completed in May of the same year and it featured a Mitsubishi Electric Diamond Vision screen, the largest video display in the world.
The official trailer for Avatar was released to a crowd of thousands in a stadium and currently has 5 million views on YouTube.
It was a massive, four-sided LED screen that was so big it offered over 11,000 square feet which is the equivalent of 3268 52-inch television screens, according to Reuters. Counting the people in the stadium, plus the massive at-home viewership, the trailer audience of millions is said to have been the largest live-viewing of any motion picture trailer in history.
4 KOREA RELEASED A 4D VERSION
Don’t read any further, unless you want to feel really duped by your Avatar movie-going experience. Variety reported in 2010 that Korean theaters released a 4D version of the film that included a much richer experience than the paltry 2D or 3D experience we had nearly ten years ago. 4-D cinemas are designed to tickle a whole range of senses beyond sight and sound. The screenings featured moving seats, explosion smells, water sprays, laser lights, and wind.
The Korean cinema chain CJ CGV premiered its 4D technology the previous year with screenings of Journey to the Center of the Earth. If this entry just made you bitter, fear not! The Korean chain just opened up a seven theater complex in Flushing, Queens, according to the Commercial Observer.
3 CAMERON'S BEEN ACCUSED OF STEALING THE STORY MORE THAN ONCE
The only real critique Avatar faced came from those who found the story lacking in originality. The film was derisively compared to everything from Pocahontas to Ferngully, due to its fairly basic themes of environmental abuse and the evils of forced relocation colonization. But not all the critiques were so flippant, there were several creatives who felt Cameron had outright stolen some of the film’s story and they took him to court to prove it.
Bryant Moore alleged that Cameron lifted his ides for Avatar from Moore’s screenplays Aquatica and The Pollination, while Gerald Morawski claimed that his ideas were stolen and sued for breach of contract and negligent misrepresentation. Most recently, artist William Roger Dean claimed that Cameron had used the artist's paintings as inspiration for the movie. Luckily for Cameron, all suits were thrown out completely, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
2 IT'S BEEN ADAPTED FOR THE STAGE (KIND OF)
In 2015, Cirque du Soleil premiered an original production based on the world of Cameron’s Avatar. Toruk: The First Flight is a story that takes place well before the events of the film and focuses on the leonopteryx, the “flying lions” that live in Pandora’s upper atmosphere. A life-size puppet was created to serve as the creature and several individuals served as bodies for other Pandorian creatures like the Direhorse, the Austrapede, the Turtapede, and the Viperwolf.
Toruk: The First Flight has 7 acrobatic acts, including Aerial Silks, Spanish Webs, and Tumbling.
Cameron served as a consultant on the production, which is still running and promises a DVD release soon. In addition to the large-scale puppetry in use, there were also teams of acrobats and other unique movement performers brought in to put the unique abilities of the Na’vi on display.
1 ONE KEY EFFECT WAS ALMOST ENTIRELY PRACTICAL
One of the biggest suspensions of disbelief required to watch Avatar was the paralysis of Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully. Cameron needed to create a set of believable paralyzed legs for the beefy Australian actor and they would require their own set of special effects to bring them to life.
According to the Avatar Blog, a mold was made from the legs of a paraplegic man to approximate the muscle atrophy present in someone who’d been paralyzed as long as Sully had been.
When the mold was made, a set of legs were created to serve as prosthetics while Worthington hid his own legs behind the wheelchair he used for his character’s human scenes.
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