Avatar
Avatar is a 2009 American science fiction film written and directed by James Cameron, and starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Michelle Rodriguez and Stephen Lang. The epic is set in the year 2154 on Pandora, a fictional world in a distant planetary system. Humans are engaged in mining Pandora's reserves of a precious mineral, while the Na'vi—a race of indigenous humanoids—resist the colonists' expansion, which threatens the continued existence of the Na'vi and the Earth-like Pandoran ecosystem. The film's title refers to the remotely controlled, genetically engineered human-Na'vi bodies used by the film's human characters to interact with the natives.[5]
Avatar had been in development since 1994 by Cameron, who wrote an 80-page scriptment for the film.[6] Filming was supposed to take place after the completion of Titanic, and the film would have been released in 1999, but according to Cameron, "technology needed to catch up" with his vision of the film.[7][8] In early 2006, Cameron developed the script, the language, and the culture of Pandora.[9] He has stated that if Avatar is successful, two sequels to the film are planned.[10]
The film was released in traditional 2-D and 3-D, as well as IMAX 3D formats. Avatar is officially budgeted at $237 million;[2] other estimates put the cost at $280–310 million to produce and an estimated $150 million for marketing.[11][12][13] The film is being touted as a breakthrough in terms of filmmaking technology, for its development of 3D viewing and stereoscopic filmmaking with cameras that were specially designed for the film's production.[14] Opening to critical acclaim and commercial success, it grossed an estimated $27 million on its opening day and made $77,025,481 in the United States and Canada on its opening weekend.[15] Worldwide, Avatar grossed an estimated $232,180,000 on its opening weekend,[16] the ninth-largest opening-weekend gross of all time, and the largest for a non-franchise, non-sequel and original film. After 17 days in release, it became the fastest film to reach $1 billion in box office receipts,[3] making the film the fourth highest-grossing of all time, and the fifth to gross more than $1 billion worldwide.[17]