Avatar: The Way of Water continues to impress audiences worldwide. James Cameron’s adventure surrounding the Sully family goes back to the world of Pandora, home of the Na’vi. In a new behind-the-scenes featurette released through The Wrap, the team behind The Way of Water’s production design talks about the process of bringing Pandora to life, whether in a computer-generated environment or a physical set built for the production of the film. Added to supervising the locations in which the story takes place, the team was also in charge of designing the creatures found in Pandora’s jungles and oceans, including the friendly tulkuns.
“One of the main challenges of designing a world from the ground up is all of the details”, Dylan Cole, production designer of the film, mentioned in the video. The team’s enormous effort during the second movie in the Avatar series paid off, since they were recently nominated for an Academy Award for Best Production Design. It remains to be seen if they can take home the coveted award, when the 95th Academy Awards ceremony takes place on March 12 at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles.
Avatar: The Way of Water, which recently became the biggest first-run IMAX film ever, takes place more than a decade after the events of the first film, with Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) now dedicated to raising their children. They lead a peaceful life until the military comes back to Pandora, led by an avatar with the consciousness of the deceased Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang). The Sully family are then forced to leave their home in an attempt to escape Quaritch’s reach, in a thrilling action adventure that brings the fight to Pandora’s oceans, in contrast to the first movie’s focus on the moon’s forest.
The film has been a massive success, recently passing $2.116 billion at the worldwide box office, placing itself on track to surpass Cameron’s Titanic on the all-time list. Audiences can rest assured that they will be going back to the world of Pandora soon, since Disney has three more Avatar films scheduled to release during the next few years. The next Avatar sequel, which remains untitled as of now, is set to hit theaters on December 20, 2024. Fans won’t have to wait too much to find out what is the next step in the Sully family’s journey.
You can check out the featurette showcasing Avatar: The Way of Water’s production design below:
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