Fussing About The 'Avatar' Sequels' Cost Is Nonsense

Obviously, a lot is going on in the world right now, and some families can't even be sure of when their next Avatar movie is coming. According to director James Cameron hopefully soon -- although if they really want to avoid yet another delay, maybe Avatar 2 could just be a cast read-through on Zoom, and we'll all just try to create the blue cat-people and "Rainforest Cafe on mushrooms" scenery in our imaginations. Cameron also made headlines after revealing that the sequels will cost a whopping, Dr. Evil meme-generating, one billion dollars!

Wow, that's ... really not that much when you think about it. Like it or not, Cameron's making four more Avatar movies, so that breaks down to roughly $250 million per film. To put that in perspective, the Cameron-produced Terminator: Dark Fate cost just less than $200 million, and it's set on Earth, with no magical trees or Great Leonopteryxes. And the reigning box office champion Avengers: Endgame reportedly cost over $350 million -- though to be fair, Robert Downey Jr. probably makes more than Sam Worthington, a guy who starred in one of the biggest movies of all time then went on to play a dude who hangs out with Jesus in a gentrified murder shack.

This is all especially silly considering that being publicly mocked for his large budgets, then delivering a monster, zeitgeist-dominating hit is pretty much James Cameron's job at this point. After the media tittered at Terminator 2's mounting costs back in 1991, it went on to rake in $500 million worldwide. Almost the exact same thing happened with True Lies. Then, most famously, Titanic was predicted to be a flop as disastrous as the Andrea Dorea after it went over-budget, was delayed multiple times, and because it lacked a "major star."

Instead, it made all the money, won all the Oscars, and likely inspired a small country's worth of misguided cruise ship hook-ups. Again in 2009, Avatar's cost raised eyebrows, and that turned out okay. So maybe, just maybe, James Cameron knows what he's doing with these erotic Smurf adventure movies' budgets.

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Top Image: 20th Century Studios