'Avatar: The Way of Water' writers attended '6-month boot camp' to create entire franchise
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: James Cameron's 'Avatar: The Way of Water' is living up to its expectations by creating new records at the box office. The movie, which was released on December 16, serves as a sequel to the 2009 movie 'Avatar' and sees Jake Sully and his family continuing their lives in the magical world of Pandora. However, the stakes are higher this time around because the enemies are closing in and they are searching for the Sully family. However, they are not the only who had everything on the line.
When the first 'Avatar' movie came out in theatres, we knew that it had all the potential of becoming an extraordinary franchise, but to build a world like that a filmmaker needs a brilliant team of writing that can wield magic in their words and manage to stitch a story that can be remembered for a lot of years. The preparations started with the first one and Cameron made sure that the writers were given ample amount of time tell the story of Na'vi tribe.
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In a recent interview given to Variety, 'Avatar' screenwriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver revealed how the entire franchise was created almost 10 years ago and every writer, including Cameron, attended the "'Avatar' boot camp" to work on ideas about how the franchise can move forward. The idea was very simple and Cameron had everything sorted out. According to Silver, all the writers had to be together for six months and come up with their own ideas on how to take the story forward.
The boot camp was so great that the initial plan of havig three movies had to be changed as the writers continue to pitch in great ideas.
"We met for six months. It was so big and so exciting. But it was going to take the room to wrangle all this amazing material into three movies that would each be individual yet follow the saga of all these different characters in these expanding worlds," Silver said.
However, things got really problematic when they started mapping out the characters on the whiteboard because they knew they had to do all the stuff while thinking about an entire franchise. Fortunately, when they reached the final stages, everyond seemed to be on the same page and were thinking on the same lines.
"There was so much material that a handful of really large whiteboards suddenly became this room full of whiteboards. I mean, whiteboards were everywhere, and then whiteboards that flipped over and you could write on the other side. […] When there was an outline or treatment for the first movie, we all contributed to it. We did that on each film. By the time we got to the last one, I think we had a mind-meld. One of us would come up with an idea and someone else would be simultaneously coming up with that same idea," Jaffa said.
The hard work has paid off because the movie has already earned over $881 million at the global box office in just 10 days. The film will surely cross the $1 billion mark before the year ends.
'Avatar: The Way of Water' is currently playing in theatres.
