By now, we all know the story – in the 2010 wake of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, it was clear that the theme park industry had been changed forever. The age of the “Living Land” had arrived, and theme park operators raced to choose, purchase, or license the biggest intellectual properties they could find in (or out of) their home-grown studio catalogs.
As the story goes, seeing guests line up for shops and restaurants in Universal’s Hogsmeade lit a fire under Disney that had not been seen in decades. The first Disney-distributed Marvel film was still a year away; the company’s purchase of Lucasfilm, two years away. So there, sensing a seismic shift to the business, Disney looked around for something – anything! – Potter-sized to bring to its parks. And in 2010, nothing was bigger than Avatar.
The James Cameron film had spent the year breaking every conceivable record. Its box office topped $2.7 billion – an unthinkable sum even today, when billion-dollar blockbusters are still rare. Avatar had captured the globe. A first wide-release modern 3D film, it was a sensation; a CGI big screen event that few had ever seen on such a scale before. If you didn’t see Avatar, you were out of the loop. And that meant that Disney’s 2011 announcement – that it had acquired the worldwide, global rights to build theme park attractions based on the 20th Century Fox film – was a major win… Right?
The Anti-Avatar Club
To be clear, there was pretty immediate pushback to Disney’s September 2011 announcement. Though the deal had only been secured days earlier, we already knew the first output: a full, permanent Avatar land at Disney’s Animal Kingdom theme park. That, of course, ruffled feathers.
Did a PG-13 sci-fi action film really belong at Disney’s Animal Kingdom? For that matter, how would a fictional alien moon besieged by a human-led military assault for mineral resources seen in the film translate to a theme park at all? Who would want to visit a war-torn Pandora? What made this one-year-old film worthy of a permanent land besides its box office? And why should Disney’s purest and most beautiful theme park be burdened with a land themed to a 20th Century Fox war movie?
It was clear that fans weren’t thrilled about the project that would become Pandora: The World of Avatar. And though it sounds short-sighted in retrospect, anyone who was a fan of the parks in the early 2010s will tell you: we were all on the Anti-Avatar bandwagon. It seemed like the wrong time, place, and property; like this was an unproven IP that didn’t deserve a permanent land. And adding even more complexity to the situation, something unprecedented happened to Avatar: it disappeared.
Seriously, most of the 2010s were filled with online think pieces that basically wondered aloud: Why Doesn’t Anyone Care About The Biggest Film of All Time? Just about everyone had seen Avatar; but no one seemed to remember it. An easy test was to ask a room of friends if they could recall the movie’s plot; quote a single memorable line; even name the main character.
It seemed true that Disney’s big bet on Avatar had been a dud. Especially if an Avatar area was supposed to be Disney’s answer to Harry Potter, even a few years had revealed that the biggest movie of all time still didn’t stand a chance next to the “boy wizard.” Even as the first concept art and models of the land were revealed in 2013, skepticism remained high.
As Avatar fell further from pop culture memory year after year after year, fans began to cross their fingers that Disney was noticing Avatar‘s lack of staying power. Rumors began to mount that internally, Disney regretted their deal; that James Cameron’s infamous difficulty to work with was wearing on Imagineering; that Disney toured the rights-holders to J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings around Animal Kingdom, perhaps as a signal to Cameron that if he didn’t play ball, an IP-infused version of the park’s never-built Beastly Kingdom might indeed rise instead of an Avatar land.
A sequel – initially set for 2014 – didn’t materialize. Even so, Cameron announced that instead of the two follow-up films he’d initially announced, Avatar would now have no less than five sequels. It was almost laughable, starting a whole new round of mockery. In the midst of the world forgetting about Avatar, who cared about an Avatar sequel, much less five of them?! Sure, the first film had made more money than any other – probably on the back of inflated 3D ticket prices and vital, gotta-see-it CGI appeal… but a second film wouldn’t have the same built-in, billion-dollar guarantee, especially if no one cared about or remembered the characters or plot.
But after three years of silence, Camp Minnie-Mickey closed… and it seemed inevitable that a still-unnamed Avatar land was coming to Disney’s Animal Kingdom, like it or not. Though we all know how that went, on the next page, we’ll dissect the worries around Avatar 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 and decide if Avatar is over… again.
When Pandora: The World of Avatar opened in 2017 – six years after its announcement – fans’ fears were pretty quickly quelled. Brilliantly, under the leadership of Animal Kingdom’s patron saint and creative lead Joe Rohde, Pandora took a very different direction than anyone had expected. That’s because to appreciate Pandora, you don’t have to know anything about Avatar.
None of the land requires you to know the plot of the film or any of its characters. Instead, Animal Kingdom’s World of Pandora invites you to join the Alpha Centauri Expeditions company, traveling to a distinct region of the alien moon not specifically seen on screen; an ecological preserve called the Valley of Mo’ara. The equivalent of what we’d call a National Park, this valley is protected by the Pandora Conservation Initiative.
Importantly, it’s also set decades – maybe centuries – after the film itself. Evidence of humanity’s failed attempts to takeover the planet are visible – old army bases, abandoned military equipment, etc. – but it’s all covered in moss, or repurposed by PCI. Our job is to be eco-tourists, coming to this alien world to learn from its flora and fauna, and to commune with its native Na’vi people, sharing in their customs and cuisine. It’s a very smart way for Animal Kingdom to handle this property, using another world as a place for us to learn about our own.
So even if Avatar was all-but-forgotten, Disney had done the impossible by creating a theme park presence for the IP that could last, even when its source material didn’t. But hey, that was luck, right? Only because of Rohde & Imagineering’s skillful weaving did Disney manage to make the best of its Avatar predicament. But surely, Disney’s once-high hops of “global” Avatar attractions was a bit too hasty. After all, with the ever-delayed sequel sure to underperform and pop culture having long since forgotten the “biggest film of all time,” Animal Kingdom’s World of Avatar looked likely to be the first and last Avatar presence in Disney Parks…
The Way of Water
In 2019, Disney’s then-CEO Bob Iger made the biggest acquisition of his career. After having shepherded Disney’s buy-outs of Pixar ($7.2 billion), Marvel ($4 billion), and Lucasfilm ($4 billion), Iger decided to have Disney gobble up one of the other “Big Six” film studios on Earth: 20th Century Fox. After a bidding war with Universal’s owner, Comcast, saw the price rise by nearly $20 billion, Disney ended up handing over an eye-watering $71.3 billion – enough to buy ten Pixars, or 18 Star Warses.
Whether it was “worth it” is hard to quantify, especially since the massive purchase happened to come through just before COVID changed the entertainment industry forever. But it did mean that – like Star Wars and Indiana Jones – Disney retroactively became the owner of a franchise it had previously only licensed for its theme parks. Now, the long-delayed Avatar 2 would have the full might of Disney’s marketing muster.
But with Avatar now 10 years in the rear-view mirror, CGI having lost its crowd-gripping appeal, and 3D movies largely a thing of the past, would 2022’s second Avatar movie matter?
Just ask the box office. There, The Way of Water scored $2.3 billion, making this sequel the third highest grossing film of all time (with Disney’s Avengers: Endgame wedged between it and the original Avatar). There was no doubt now that Avatar hadn’t really disappeared; it had just gone into stasis. Even if people couldn’t name the film’s main character or remember a particular quote or scene, Avatar did present a world compelling enough for people to want to re-visit. Luckily, it’s that world that Disney’s theme parks brought to life.
With Avatar: The Way of Water ensuring that the next four sequels will get the green light (indeed, number three has already finished filming), James Cameron’s Avatar did the impossible. It came back from the dead. Jokes about how no one wanted Avatar 2 had aged like a gallon of milk in the sun. Avatar mattered, and literal billions at the box office proved it. Right…?
The Avatar Slump
Sure, as before, naysayers can conclude that Avatar 2 benefitted from surcharges for 3D movies, or from the viral appeal of seeing how Cameron’s CGI process had improved since 2009. But there’s simply no denying that Avatar: The Way of Water was another colossal, record-shattering hit. Think about it. The top three highest grossing films ever are an Avatar, an Avengers, and another Avatar.
And with the same reckless abandon they offered a dozen years ago, Disney raced to make announcements. Iger said at a February 2023 investor call, “I’m thrilled to announce that we will be bringing an exciting ‘Avatar’ experience to Disneyland. We’ll be sharing more details on that very soon.” (By the way, that was news to the resort’s President, Ken Potrock, who learned about an Avatar presence in California the same way we all did.)
No one knows what Disney might have in store for Avatar in California. (It could be as simple as an Avatar exhibit in Downtown Disney, as big as adding a standalone Flight of Passage to a New Tomorrowland, or – for all we know – as elaborate as a standalone Avatar boutique theme park.) But before we get ahead of ourselves, you’ve got to wonder: how many Na’vi did you see walking around for Halloween? How many kids have Avatar toys on their Christmas lists? And by the way, what is the main character’s name?
Yep, we’ve entered what appears to be another period of stasis for Avatar. With a precision few other franchises can muster, Avatar “enters the chat,” makes several billion dollars in box office receipts, then… well… disappears. Even now – less than a year after Iger’s announcement of an Avatar presence at Disneyland, the landscape has totally changed. The Way of Water feels like a distant memory. And just like last time, waves of delay have already begun. (The series was meant to release an entry in December of every odd-numbered year, concluding in 2028. That has now shifted to 2031.)
Which is all well and good! Maybe it’s okay if Avatar re-enters pop culture and our collective mindset exactly as long as one of its films is in theaters, then disappears for years until the next entry is ready. Except, what happens after the last film has come out? If every Avatar theme park experience is as strong (and importantly, as independent from the films) as Animal Kingdom’s Pandora, maybe there’s nothing to worry about…! But what makes franchises timeless is when they persevere beyond their box office. Star Wars launched a multimedia empire, surviving decades without film entries. Will Avatar?
The good news is, Disney is lucky that Pandora: The World of Avatar is strong, timeless land that’s disconnected enough from the Avatar film franchise that it will remain meaningful even once Avatar is over for good. However, it’s certainly interesting to consider that one of Disney’s biggest franchises also feels like its least enduring. And what that means for the parks is a complication we’ll have to see play out together…
What do you think – should Disney invest heavily in bringing permanent Avatar experiences to its theme parks? Or do you think this franchise has proven – twice in a row – that its footprints just aren’t sticking in the cement of pop culture and that it should only come to the parks in temporary ways going forward?
And if you enjoyed this look into Disney’s ebb and flow with Avatar, you might enjoy finding out how Universal is trying to make a Harry Potter land work when it’s anchored in the flubbed Fantastic Beasts film series that (like Avatar) ballooned from one to five films despite relative disinterest from fans…
