Pretty much everyone knows by now that when James Cameron’s Avatar came out at the end of 2009, it quickly rose to become the world’s highest-grossing film at the box office – taking the top spot from another Cameron film, Titanic – turning its budget of just under 0m. into almost .8bn.
When you have a 0m. budget, you don’t make back more than ten times your initial investment. You just don’t. But obviously, the record-breaking Cameron is one to buck the trends.
Since its turn in the cinema, Avatar has been released in more than one edition over the past two years, earning itself the title of top-selling Blu-Ray as well, and Variety are now reporting that the film will soon be given a new release, in both HD and SD and fully loaded with special features, on Apple’s iTunes.
The release, the “Avatar iTunes Extras Special Edition,” will be the first of Fox’s films to be made available in HD on the platform, and it will be with us just in time for Christmas, from 20th December. (At the very least, the US will be getting it then; we may have to wait a little longer for it to be available for us – I’m not too familiar on if iTunes’ library is different depending on your location.)
This new edition will let us see Cameron’s original screenplay for the film, his scriptment (a combination of screenplay and treatment), and a gallery of over 1,700 images, and it will also,
“offer interactive extras that will enable viewers to deconstruct 17 scenes in splitscreen that reveal how the f/x for the sequences were created through various levels of the performance capture and post-production processes.”
For US buyers, the HD edition is priced up at $19.99 and the SD will be $14.99, so whether we can just alter the dollar sign to a pound sign for us here in the UK remains to be seen. To promote the new release, a brand new trailer for the special edition has been put together, and it does look pretty impressive, allowing you to do things that give you a real insight into the filmmaking process.
Cameron has announced that Avatar will be getting two sequels to create a trilogy, with plans to shoot them back-to-back, and tentative release dates set for December 2014 and December 2015. And that, in turn, means that for we can look forward to The Hobbit for Christmas in 2012 and 2013, followed by Avatar for Christmas the two years following that. Something tells me we’ve got some huge Christmas box office figures ahead of us for the next four years. And that’s not even mentioning Tarantino’s Django Unchained opening on Christmas Day next year. Without further ado, though, the new trailer for the Avatar iTunes Extras Special Edition. Enjoy.
