Skip to main content

Disney World partners with James Cameron for Avatar theme park

AvatarAvatar fans desperately hoping for a chance to visit Pandora someday might very well be able to get a taste of the lush planet here on Earth, if Disney and James Cameron get their way.

Disney announced plans this week for an Avatar-themed addition to its Disney World theme park, with Cameron and his Lightstorm Entertainment production company assisting in the development of the attractions.

Deadline has the full press release from Disney, which indicates that the new attractions will first pop up in Animal Kingdom in Orlando, and allow visitors to “enter the Avatar universe and explore it first-hand.”

The agreement announced today gives The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS) exclusive global theme park rights to the AVATAR franchise and provides for additional AVATAR themed lands at other Disney parks. The other locations will be determined by Disney and its international theme park partners. James Cameron, Jon Landau and their Lightstorm Entertainment group will serve as creative consultants on the projects and will partner with Walt Disney Imagineering in the design and development of the AVATAR themed lands.

“To bring [Avatar] to life at Animal Kingdom is fantastic because it’s so thematically aligned,” added Cameron in the official statement. “We want to do things that maybe they haven’t even thought of.”

Disney is expected to begin construction on the Avatar complex in 2013. Theme park chief Tom Staggs compared the scope of the project to the company’s 12-acre “Cars Land” complex in California. The 2013 start is also expected to time the park’s opening until just after the release of the next two films in the Avatar franchise, currently slated for 2014 and 2015 premieres.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Rick Marshall
A veteran journalist with more than two decades of experience covering local and national news, arts and entertainment, and…
Avatar: The Way of Water trailer highlights Pandora in all its beauty
Two Na'vi characters stand in the water in a scene from Avatar: The Way of Water.

Ahead of the film's release date next month, 20th Century Studios released the official trailer for the highly anticipated Avatar: The Way of Water. The trailer features breathtaking visuals of Pandora, including stunning ocean footage, and teases an impending conflict for the Na'vi.

The sequel to 2009's Avatar is set more than 10 years after the events in the first film. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is now fully a member of the Na'vi, and with his partner, Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), had four children together. However, trouble is on the horizon as outside forces attempt to destroy Pandora once again. It's a battle for survival as Jake tries to save his family and his new world from destruction.

Read more
James Cameron’s sci-fi epic Avatar returns to theaters, but has its magic faded?
Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana fall in love on Pandora.

There were plenty of reasons to wonder, in the autumn of 2009, if James Cameron had finally flown too close to the sun, burning a big budget on a boondoggle. Nearly a dozen years after emerging from a troubled production with the biggest movie of all time, the disaster-weepie phenomenon Titanic, the blockbuster maestro had once more secured enormous investment in pursuit of a bank-busting special-effects spectacle to rule them all. Except this time, the movie in question looked, from a distance, like the height of overreaching silliness: A sci-fi fantasy about a species of lithe, ocean-blue, vaguely feline aliens, prancing through a tropical paradise. The first trailer prompted chortles. Cameron, however, would have the last laugh.

Avatar, like Titanic before it, did more than silence the skeptics. It vindicated all the grand, hubristic ambition of its creator, at least from a commercial standpoint. Somehow, Cameron had done it again, and unbelievably surpassed the box-office success of his last conquest of the record books. Avatar, a hodgepodge of science fiction tropes in a cutting-edge package, was the big-screen event that everyone had to attend. Globally speaking, it quickly became the biggest movie of all time — a title it lost a decade later to Avengers: Endgame, then won again thanks to a rerelease in Chinaduring the pandemic. Even adjusted for inflation, the movie sits toward the top of the all-time charts.

Read more
James Cameron on pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in Avatar and Super/Natural
Neytiri and Jake in Avatar.

James Cameron is on a mission to push beyond what's possible. The Academy Award-winning filmmaker quickly became a visionary for his early work in The Terminator franchise and Aliens. Titanic went from a film plagued with production problems to 11 Oscar wins and the first film to reach the $1 billion mark. Cameron's Avatar dazzled the world with its use of 3D technology on its way to becoming the highest-grossing film of all time, a title it still holds today.

Despite becoming one of the most important filmmakers of the last 40 years, Cameron is an explorer at heart, and his fascination with the Earth is on display in the new National Geographic series, Super/Natural. Executive produced by Cameron, Super/Natural takes viewers into the minds of the world's extraordinary creatures. Thanks to scientific and technological advancements, the series displays some of the most fascinating imagery ever recorded.

Read more