Avatar is a 2009 American science fiction epic film written and directed by James Cameron and starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Michelle Rodriguez and Stephen Lang. The film is set in the year 2154 on Pandora, a moon in the Alpha Centauri star system. Humans are engaged in mining Pandora's reserves of a precious mineral, while the Na'vi—a race of indigenous humanoids—resist the colonists' expansion, which threatens the continued existence of the Na'vi and the Pandoran ecosystem. The film's title refers to the genetically engineered bodies used by the film's characters to interact with the Na'vi.

Avatar had been in development since 1994 by Cameron, who wrote an 80-page scriptment for the film. Filming was supposed to take place after the completion of Titanic, and the film would have been released in 1999, but according to Cameron, "technology needed to catch up" with his vision of the film. In early 2006, Cameron developed the script, the language, and the culture of Pandora. He mentioned that sequels are possible if Avatar is successful.

The film was released in traditional 2-D and 3-D, as well as IMAX 3D formats. Avatar is officially budgeted at $237 million; other estimates put the cost at $280–310 million to produce and an estimated $150 million for marketing. The film is being touted as a breakthrough in terms of filmmaking technology, for its development of 3D viewing and stereoscopic filmmaking with cameras that were specially designed for the film's production.

Opening to critical acclaim and commercial success, it grossed $27 million on its opening day and $77 million in the United States and Canada on its opening weekend. Worldwide, Avatar grossed $232 million on its opening weekend, the ninth-largest opening-weekend gross of all time, and the largest for a non-franchise, non-sequel and original film. After 17 days in release, it became the fastest film to reach $1 billion in box office receipts and the fifth to gross more than $1 billion worldwide. Within three weeks of its release, the film became the second highest grossing film of all time worldwide.

Filming and effects

In December 2006, Cameron explained that the delay in producing the film since the 1990s had been to wait until the technology necessary to create his project was advanced enough. The director planned to create photo-realistic computer-generated characters by using motion-capture animation technology, on which he had been doing work for the past 14 months. Unlike previous motion-capture systems, where the digital environment is added after the actors' motions have been captured, Cameron's new virtual camera allows him to observe directly on a monitor how the actors' virtual counterparts interact with the movie's digital world in real time and adjust and direct the scenes just as if shooting live action; "It’s like a big, powerful game engine. If I want to fly through space, or change my perspective, I can. I can turn the whole scene into a living miniature and go through it on a 50 to 1 scale."

Cameron pioneered a specially designed camera built into a 6-inch boom that allowed the facial expressions of the actors to be captured and digitally recorded for the animators to use later.

Cameron planned to continue developing the special effects for Avatar, which he hoped would be released in mid-2009. He also gave fellow directors Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson a chance to test the new technology. Spielberg and George Lucas were also able to visit the set to watch Cameron direct with the equipment.

Other technological innovations include "The Volume", a motion-capture stage six times larger than any previously used, and an improved method of capturing facial expressions, enabling full performance capture. To achieve the latter, actors wore individually-made skull caps fitted with a tiny camera positioned in front of the actors' faces; the information collected about their facial expressions and eyes is then transmitted to computers. According to Cameron, the method allows the filmmakers to transfer about 95% of the actors' performances to their digital counterparts. Besides a real-time virtual world, the team also experimented with a way of allowing the computer-generated characters to interact with real actors on a real, live-action set while shooting live action.

In January 2007, Fox announced that the studio's Avatar would be filmed in 3D at 24 frames per second despite Cameron's strong opinion that a 3D film requires higher frame rate to make strobing less noticeable. Cameron described the film as a hybrid with a full live-action shoot in combination with computer-generated characters and live environments. "Ideally at the end of the day the audience has no idea which they’re looking at," Cameron said. The director indicated that he had already worked four months on nonprincipal scenes for the film. Principal photography began in April 2007, and was done around parts of Los Angeles as well as New Zealand. The live action was shot with a modified version of the proprietary digital 3D Fusion Camera System, developed by Cameron and Vince Pace. According to Cameron, the film is composed of 60% computer-generated elements and 40% live action, as well as traditional miniatures. Motion-capture photography would last 31 days at the Hughes Aircraft stage in Playa Vista, Los Angeles, California. In October, Cameron was scheduled to shoot live-action in New Zealand for another 31 days.

To create the human mining colony on Pandora, production designers visited the Noble Clyde Boudreaux drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico during June 2007. They photographed, measured and filmed every aspect of the rig, which was replicated on-screen with photorealistic CGI. More than a thousand people worked on the production. Cameron sent the cast of Avatar off to the jungle for bonding boot-camp exercises before he started shooting the film.

In a 2009 profile in The New Yorker, Cameron claimed that the digital elements of Avatar are believable enough that the audience will be unable to tell reality from computer animation. In Cameron's words, "This film integrates my life's achievements... it's the most complicated stuff anyone's ever done."

Here is the trailer of the film