It has been about two years since James Cameron‘s “Avatar” destroyed the box office, got nerds drooling and had everyone in Hollywood deciding that everything had to be in 3D (with the director himself leading the chorus). With over $2.7 billion in ticket sales (good lord guys, the movie is not that good), 20th Century Fox and Cameron, who gets a nice slice of the pie, have continued to rake it in with DVD and BluRay sales (no doubt helped by their environmentally friendly double-dip of releases within months of each other) and the expansive merchandising, which has seen the movie whored out to anybody with a printer and UPC code (have you picked up your “Avatar” Party Pack?). So it’s a bit of a surprise to us that it’s taken this long for a theme park ride to emerge.
Today Disney announced that fans will now get to fork over their money in a whole new way when the first “Avatar” ride opens at Animal Kingdom in Orlando sometime in the distant future. “’Avatar’ created a world which audiences can discover again and again and now, through this incredible partnership with Disney, we’ll be able to bring Pandora to life like never before. With two new ‘Avatar’ films currently in development, we’ll have even more locations, characters and stories to explore,” said James Cameron in a press release. “I’m chomping at the bit to start work with Disney’s legendary Imagineers to bring our ‘Avatar’ universe to life. Our goal is to go beyond current boundaries of technical innovation and experiential storytelling, and give park goers the chance to see, hear, and touch the world of ‘Avatar’ with an unprecedented sense of reality.” And we’re sure that unprecedented sense of reality will get an unprecedented price tag to go with it.
Of course, any details about what the rides might contain are still being worked out, but construction is slated to begin by 2013, so don’t be surprised if Cameron attends the ribbon cutting ceremony around the same time “Avatar 2” hits theaters in December 2014. Synergize! So there you go, “Avatar” is going to be everywhere, all the time, forever. Great. [via Deadline]
