AMSTERDAM — “The future’s so bright I gotta wear shades!” James Cameron cried Tuesday as he strode onto a stage — with his 3-D glasses on — to unveil the first publicly shown clips from his $300 million 3-D sci-fi actioner “Avatar.”
The fittingly epic film promo literally added an extra dimension to Fox’s presentation at the ongoing Cinema Expo.
“Avatar” actors Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldana and Stephen Lang, pic producer Jon Landau, and Fox film chairman Jim Gianopulos also greeted the clearly wowed exhibs at the RAI convention center auditorium.
“Three years ago, I stood up here and said the 3-D renaissance is coming,” Cameron said. “And from what we’ve seen in the business, we can now say it has arrived.”
In introducing the 24-minute assemblage, Cameron said much of it came from the first third of the film but that there were also glimpses from unfinished portions of later battle scenes involving warring sides clashing over control of the fantasy world Pandora.
The filmmaker also said the action gets nonstop in the latter portions of the film, which throughout is populated by strange life-forms in a world of unprecedentedly rich fantasy elements. Worthington plays an avatar — a remote-controlled character created by melding his crippled human form into a super-human being — whose fate lies ultimately in doing battle with his own former race.
Fox made media covering the event agree not to report details of the “Avatar” images or to interview audience members for reactions. But from the sustained applause at the conclusion of the presentation, suffice to say Fox didn’t hurt itself at the event.
A cinematic hybrid of CGI, motion-capture animation and live action, “Avatar” is Cameron’s first dramatic feature since 1997’s “Titanic.” At that year’s Cinema Expo, Cameron showed eight minutes of the effects-laden disaster drama before it rang up a still-record $1.84 billion worldwide boxoffice and copping Oscar’s best pic statuette.
Cameron encouraged theater owners to add 3-D capability as quickly as possible. But acknowledging “Avatar” will have to play in a mix of conventional and extra-dimensional venues due to insufficient number of 3-D auditoriums, he added, “I just want to say that I think ‘Avatar’ is going to play great in 3-D, 2-D, any ‘D.’ ”
“Avatar” is set to open around the world on Dec. 18, though it’s become sport in Hollywood to speculate on whether the famously painstaking filmmaker will wrap the production in time. Cameron’s high-profile promo appearance should go a long way toward soothing any anxieties.
“They wouldn’t be doing this if it weren’t coming out,” a top distribution exec from a rival studio said.
Much of the technology used to capture actor performances was developed especially for “Avatar” and its effects crews at WETA Digital in New Zealand and Industrial Light + Magic in Northern California.Coming Soon has a report from a tipster who was a self-confessed 3D skeptic, and as someone who isn’t under embargo and hasn’t obsessively followed Avatar for years, this tipster provides the most coherent description of the scenes that were shown.
The tipster starts off questioning the value of the 3D and complaining about how uncomfortable the glasses are, and then states that
“It’s the third scene where my heart begins to pound like crazy.” That’s the first introduction to the movie’s main, all-CGI characters, and the tipster is dumbstruck: “I thought–just like you guys–that I’ve seen it all with Gollum, or The Hulk, but Cameron has done it again.”
Check out the spoileriffic details from the tipster on Comingsoon.. or keep yourself in the dark so you can be just as shocked the first time you see it.
[Source] THR & Coming Soon
