Week-to-Week: 3D, Theme Parks, and the Elusive Cultural Legacy of Avatar
A pre-sequel re-release explains the phenomenon while reminding us why it faded from memory
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If you’ve been anywhere near Twitter of late, then you’ve sensed the drumbeat of the ongoing Avatar discourse grow louder. This is not a new discourse: in the thirteen years since it became the highest-grossing film of all time, James Cameron’s blockbuster has inevitably bubbled to the surface for one reason or another, and every time it has been confronted with the same basic cycle. When evidence is presented that Avatar was a legitimate cultural phenomenon—a Disney theme park expansion opens, Avengers: Endgame surpasses it as the highest-grossing film of all-time, a Chinese release makes it the highest-grossing film of all time again, the appearance of intense Avatar fans in How To With John Wilson, etc.—there is this groundswell of people asking a fair question: if that is true, why does no one ever talk about Avatar?
If you’re Extremely Online, you’ve no doubt been exposed to this discourse, but it’s possible you’ve also encountered it on first dates, or among friends, or in your college classes (where I’ll be interrogating my students on their perception of the film later today). This is no truer than now: after being joked about as vaporware for years, the first of James Cameron’s four—not a typo, four—planned sequels is finally being released, and Disney’s remastered 4K/HDR release of the film earned over $31 million worldwide in its first weekend. And across the internet, and perhaps across your life, people are grappling once more with the much-debated question of whether Avatar has or even had “cultural impact.”
My personal relationship to Avatar has always been tied to my experience seeing it in theaters. It’s a story I tell often (including, admittedly, on a first date): in the morning of the day I saw Avatar in non-IMAX 3D, I picked up my very first pair of glasses, having only recently become aware that I needed them. From the moment I put them on in a crowded mall on a December Saturday, I realized that it was like seeing the world anew, and I have this vivid memory of being just absolutely transfixed by Avatar that evening. But I’ve always understood that it is impossible for me to decouple my experience with the film from my experience with the glasses—I had no way of truly knowing if it was that the movie was just that spectacular, or if I was simply seeing a movie with properly corrected vision for the first time in 4-5 years.
This is the story I’ve told anyone who expresses an opinion about Avatar, or about Avatar: The Way of Water, either before or after it had a title and a proper release date. And it was my justification for dragging said first date—I don’t think he even remembered that particular conversational interlude from over four months ago, which, fair—to see the film’s re-release in IMAX 3D. It was a matter of scientific inquiry. I wanted to understand my own experience, with the hope that it might equally help unlock why so many had either forgotten why they saw it, or failed to register why it was that everyone was seeing it nearly thirteen years ago.
The long answer here pushes us to ask what components of a film define its cultural impact, and how Avatar’s has eroded through a combination of industrial mismanagement and its own limitations as a story.
The short answer is that it wasn’t just the glasses.
I don’t own Avatar on DVD or Blu-ray, and while I know I’ve watched at least some portion of it on cable over the years, I can’t recall the last time I saw the film in its entirety.1 But it’s not as though the film hasn’t been in wide circulation: beyond the cable airings, the film was a home video success story, with a bare-bones DVD/Blu-ray becoming the top-selling title of 2010 in only four days, including an all-time record for the emerging Blu-ray format. This was followed later in the year by a Blu-Ray with bonus features, and in 2011 by a 3D Blu-ray for the emerging market of 3D-enabled televisions. The people who made Avatar the highest-grossing film of all-time showed plenty of evidence that they wanted the film to continue to be a part of their lives.
But it shouldn’t be controversial to say that Avatar’s cultural legacy feels smaller than it should be given the sheer scale of its success. Some of this has to do with the film’s lack of a sequel, which kept the story from being extended just as Marvel was fetishizing ongoing cinematic narratives with Phase One of the MCU. There’s also the fact that Avatar is actually not a compelling story to begin with, hampered by its derivativeness and its disinterest in deconstructing its white savior complex. But the biggest reason is that what generated the cultural sensation around Avatar was the experience of witnessing it in a theater, something that no home viewing experience was ever going to be able to recreate despite Cameron’s claims in the above video, and which has grown increasingly distant in the memories of everyone who didn’t happen to get glasses the same day.
But it’s too simple to say that people just “forget” how much they were transported by the experience of seeing Avatar—more than likely in 3D—back in 2009/2010. The bigger issue is that the film industry worked swiftly and diligently to destroy whatever positive association we had with 3D movies in the years that followed, flooding the market with post-production conversions that looked terrible, with darkened pictures and no purpose beyond milking an extra $3 out of us. And if you were in markets like Canada that operate under a virtual monopoly, it’s possible that you didn’t just get burned on pointless 3D in Avatar’s immediate impact: theaters in Nova Scotia, where I grew up, continue to show some major blockbusters primarily in 3D, a problem that has barely gotten any better in the four years since I did the math during the busy holiday movie season given that I was forced to see Spider Man: No Way Home in 3D nine months ago.
Regardless of whether you’re still confronting it or have long since moved past it, the film industry’s squandering of the novelty of 3D has no doubt played a role in Avatar being “memory holed” by a larger public. The fact that you would be hard-pressed to name a single other film since Avatar that successfully used 3D in a meaningful way marks it as a cultural dead end, with mostly negative consequences on our experience of going to the movies.2 And as people stopped going to see 3D movies altogether—the boyfriend couldn’t recall his last time seeing one—it’s only natural that the memory of the experience of seeing an actual good use of the format would fade, being replaced by the meme-driven criticisms of the film itself (as Emily St. James broke down last year).
The one exception to this group may be the millions who have made the pilgrimage to Disney’s Animal Kingdom, where “Pandora - The World of Avatar” opened in 2017. Tucked away in an isolated corner of the park, the Joe Rohde-led project is one of Disney’s most immersive spaces, recreating the floating mountains from the film and putting the company’s scenic design skills to good use. Just walking through the land is one thing, but the two attractions are a stunning feat of Imagineering, and the closest you’ll come to the experience of sitting in a theater and feeling like you’ve never seen something like Avatar before.
Admittedly, the Na’vi River Journey is too screen-dependent and not worth a lengthy wait (or, in current Disney currency, a Genie+ Lightning Lane), but it is still built around small touches that showcase the power of technology to generate something magical that sticks in our minds. This is the power of engineering, and it’s in big forms of spectacle like the stunning Shaman animatronic that serves as the ride’s climax, but also in something smaller like the lighting and movement effects to simulate creatures jumping onto the fauna above your head. I rode the attraction once in the summer of 2021, and while I wasn’t willing to stand in a lengthy line to experience it again when I returned this summer, the fact I can visualize those moments is the kind of connection that Disney relies on to bring people back.
Flight of Passage, the land’s other attraction, is a different story. If you’re someone who grew skeptical over time about Avatar’s cultural impact and wondered why a movie everyone had forgotten was got its own theme park land alongside ongoing cultural phenomena like Harry Potter or Star Wars, Flight of Passage is an answer to this question. On one level, it’s just a take on Soarin’, as players fly are given temporary access to an Avatar experience on a Banshee ride through Pandora and then fly their way through the landscape. But beyond the simple beauty of that screen-led experience, you do so while on a ride vehicle that immerses you in the experience, “breathing” under you in line with the screens to sell you on the neural link with the rider serving as your eyes and ears.
Beyond the basic scientific setup, there is no “story” in The World of Avatar—it is not an effort to sell us on future sequels from a narrative perspective, or put us into the Na’vi’s battle for their homeland. Instead, it emphasizes themes of conservation and environmentalism central to the film, and creates ride experiences that immerse us into those worlds. And when I returned to Disney this summer, it didn’t matter how long the line was—I was going to experience the sensation of the Banshee breathing under me while I flew through the skies on Pandora again, because I had been thinking about it ever since. I had never experienced anything like it, and it was the first time since 2009 where I thought I maybe understood how a movie I had little desire to revisit had turned into a global phenomenon.
The paradox of Disney’s Pandora is that despite its massive success, it doesn’t actually prove Avatar still has cultural impact. It demonstrates that the I.P. has value, but it mirrors the film itself by leveraging that I.P. into experiences that can never be recreated at home. There’s a reason why 3D used to be a novelty reserved for spaces like theme parks, where Disney used attractions like Honey, I Shrunk the Audience and Captain EO to wow audiences.3 It proves that the property is able to capture the global imagination, but not because of characters we care about, or a story that resonates on a deep, emotional level. Rather, it depends on showing us this world in a way we’ve never seen before, an immersive burden that has now been placed on the forthcoming sequel.
The rerelease currently in theaters is obviously about building hype for said sequel, even including a special preview of the film after the end credits. However, I didn’t know it was there going in, and we left when the credits rolled. And while I probably would have stayed if I had known it existed, the thing is that I don’t believe it would have done anything to build hype for The Way of Water that seeing Avatar in IMAX 3D didn’t already accomplish. While a banshee might not have been breathing under me, the film’s use of 3D has the same effect of seeming a little like magic. It’s about the depth of field selling you on the height of the trees, and the moment you spot the flies and leaves that filter across the screen in so many moments. It makes 3D feel like so much more than a novelty, becoming a vital storytelling tool that doesn’t make that story any less derivative, but breathes life into it in a way that your TV at home will never accomplish.
During the film’s final scene, the camera pans down over the crowd, their hands raising amidst the ritual of Jake’s transfer into his Na’vi body. I felt a flinch next to me, and I smiled—I too had briefly had a moment where I wondered if the person in front of me was raising their hands in the air, as the cumulative effect of the film’s immersion had by that time made me so attuned to the images onscreen that the line between fantasy and reality could be blurred in this way. While the whole experience convinced me that it wasn’t just my glasses back in 2009, that final moment was when I realized how the rush to see Avatar became so widespread. Even 13 years later, there’s nothing that really compares to the experience of seeing it in a theater, and while it isn’t going to change someone’s opinion of the film itself, witnessing its spectacle in 3D will at least unlock an understanding of what happened back in 2009/2010 that made it such a phenomenon in that moment.
That was the job of this rerelease. Sure, it’s nice to refresh audiences on the story ahead of a sequel, but the goal is to make people like me evangelists for the experience of witnessing Avatar in the hopes that people will remember the high they had 13 years ago. Disney wants and needs us to believe that James Cameron is about to take us on another trip, and that the experience of seeing a movie in theaters can be transportative and transformative again in the way it felt like it was 13 years ago, despite the fact that literally no film has managed the same sensation since.
It was enough to convince me to book IMAX 3D tickets as soon as they’re available. Whether the rest of the world does the same may not determine the future of cinema, but it will say something about whether audiences still believe that going to a theater to see a movie is capable of giving them an experience impossible at home. While PLF (Premium Large Format) screens have extended beyond IMAX, and theaters have invested in amenities like recliners and food service, much of this is happening independent of the films themselves, which are increasingly less likely to be designed to take advantage of these formats in distinct ways. The Theme Park-ification of 4DX failed to extend beyond major cities, lacking a definitive film to make it feel like audiences were missing out on something vital if they chose to “just” see it in 2D.
Avatar: The Way of Water is going to challenge this notion, and based on what I saw in revisiting the original, and what millions of others likely saw when watching the preview for the sequel, I feel the skeptics might be on the wrong side of history once the box office receipts are tallied at the end of the year.
Episodic Observations
I had written much of another newsletter before I realized this was all I was thinking about this week, so tune in next week for some thoughts about the shortening windows of television release dates, which will be better timed anyway to a newly-announced (but long-rumored) reality reboot I’ll be covering in some form or another starting next weekend.
ICYMI, I chatted with John Aspler about last week’s premiere of Quantum Leap, but admittedly didn’t get to last night’s second installment thanks to screeners arriving for said reboot. I’m a bit disappointed to see my friend Marisa Roffman note the case-of-the-week still didn’t resonate, and worry the show will fail to register how vital it is to early interest to prove it’s capable of telling a meaningful one of those as they focus on character/plot development.
I caught the ninth episode of Netflix’s Dahmer over the weekend, and while the performances seemed perfectly solid, I had many questions about how there had been eight previous episodes, and how there was allegedly one more to follow, so I’m inclined to take Fienberg’s word for it and not revisit the rest.
If it wasn’t clear, I’m very curious to know everyone’s last 3D movie-going experience, which will likely reveal the Canadians in the crowd. Before No Way Home, my last would have been Into the Spider-verse, fittingly enough.
I was actually sort of convinced I hadn’t seen any of it until I suddenly had a visceral recollection of seeing the last 20 minutes or so on FX at some point in the past few years.
Curious if there are any others that stand out in this regard—Life of Pi in 2012?
Said theater is currently home to the Disney/Pixar Short Film Festival, which is a good way to escape the rain at EPCOT, and lets you see the Oscar-nominated Get a Horse!—the only one of those shorts actively built for 3D—as it was originally intended.
For me, great filmmakers have made great 3-D films that truly must be see at the cinema. When they are not, it feels like people denigrate some of these.
You already mentioned Ang Lee's Life of Pi which was stunning to watch.
Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity is the closest I will ever come to being in outer space.
Martin Scorsese's Hugo (which I knew nothing about prior to seeing) endlessly surprised and delighted my senses.
And my absolute favorite was Wim Wender's Pina. An amazing tribute documentary to one of the greatest choreographers and dancer of all-time, Pina Bausch. (I have seen 2 of her productions in person). Seeing dancing in 3-D was an immersion I never knew I needed and that I will never forget
Avatar as a theme park experience has made a more lasting impression on me than Avatar as a movie -- which is not entirely a fair comparison, since obviously the Pandora stuff is there every time you go to Animal Kingdom, whereas rewatching the film is a specific self-contained activity. But it's definitely one of those Disney World experiences that feels quite abstracted from the IP it's based on, up there with the soon-to-be-replaced Splash Mountain's loose affiliation with Song of the South for the typical parkgoer. Other modern Disney rides tend to really emphasize the plot beats and characters of their associated franchises in a way that the designers eschewed for the Pandora section. The theming is incredible, but it feels more like it's being presented as a blank canvas to write yourself into than a reminder/reproduction of any prior fan-favorite elements. (Epcot's Frozen ride might inspire you to rewatch that movie if it's been a while; I'm not sure anyone would feel that way about Avatar after riding Flight of Passage.)
As ever, it's worth remembering the timing of the park section, too. Like you mention, the MCU was still in its early days when Disney struck their deal for the World of Avatar licensing, so no one knew just how big that superhero franchise would get, and maybe the record-breaking box office numbers for Avatar seemed more promising (and less constrained by the terms of Universal's Marvel deal). But for me, the more critical point is that Pandora was greenlit before Disney acquired Star Wars, which meant they didn't really have another reliably great four-quadrant property that could have gone in that space instead. In a world in which Disney buys Lucasfilm a few years earlier, most likely Animal Kingdom is the home to something more like Galaxy's Edge, and Pandora never sees the light of day.
Because I'm so detached from Avatar as an actual movie at this point, I'll confess that my main interest in the sequels is to see if/how anything they add to the series lore ever makes its way into the theme park!