James Cameron on Avatar Sequels Budget

In the Wall Street Journal conference panel the 21st Century Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch had made a comment in regards to Avatar films that could double the budget of the sequels. But, when Mr. Cameron was questioned about such comment onstage, he laughed before adding some comments of his own.

"Obviously, they’re expensive films," he said, explaining that he wanted to take advantage of "economies of scale" when shooting the three sequels simultaneously. "We’ll literally capture the actors all at the same time, we’ll do all the live photography all at the same time, it’s sort of like we’re shooting a miniseries."

"So, theoretically, that’s a good way to dump the costs down, hopefully well below what the first film cost," he said, referring to the north of $200 million budget of the 2009 blockbuster that grossed more than $2.7 billion worldwide. The three sequels are set for release from 20th Century Fox beginning in December 2016 and in the same month in 2017 and 2018.

"You can do the math on it in your head," Cameron joked about the budget, in a comment that could've been directed at Murdoch.

Cameron didn't add much about the technological advances of the three scheduled sequels, though he did speak about the fine-tuning the current production process.

“The thing that’s still astonishing to me is how well our prototype system did work," he explained, adding later: "But it was not user-friendly at all and it was a lot of unnecessary hard work, and we just always kept consoling ourselves while we were making the film that we’ll fix it for the sequel."

“Interestingly, the term ‘filming’ is so obsolete in almost every regard because we do some image capture where there’s actual photography, but it’s done entirely on digital cameras,” he said. “And that only represents a small part, maybe 20 to 25 percent, of the total film. The rest is completely synthetically generated.”

Source: Hollywood Reporter