Believe it or not, the Alita: Battle Angel, which Cameron is producing.
Cameron's biggest challenges with Avatar's sequels will be in ensuring the technology is up to scratch and then incentivizing audiences to pay the extra dollars to see the film as he intends it to be seen. One of his great strengths as a filmmaker is in his key understanding that effects and technology should be in aid of something bigger, and not the end result. Avatar's story may have been a familiar re-tread of films like Fern Gully and Dances With Wolves, but it was a solid enough foundation to the dazzling effects. It offered a beautiful world and populated it with people worth caring about. The entire experience offered viewers something to invest in and they were willing to overlook the flaws. That won't be so easy with the sequels. Those same audiences have higher expectations now, and what was once a novelty is now par for the course thanks to acclaimed blockbusters like the recent Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets would be the biggest film of the year instead of one of its biggest flops.
Cameron's dream for 3D is a lofty one. While accepting honorary hip into the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, he laid out his plans for the Avatar sequels and their use of the technology:
I'm going to push. Not only for better tools, workflow, high dynamic range (HDR) and high frame rates (HFR) the things we are working toward. I'm still very bullish on 3D, but we need brighter projection, and ultimately I think it can happen with no glasses. We'll get there.
The technology will certainly happen, and if anyone is to use it for the cinema first it will be Cameron, but there are audience perceptions that cannot be overlooked so easily. Any headache or eye strain issues with glasses-free 3D must be sorted out before taking it to the mainstream. High frame rates offer immense creative freedom for VFX-heavy films but many viewers find them to hinder the viewing experience. Peter Jackson's use of a 48 frame per second (FPS) rate in Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. Most viewers didn't see that in the planned 120 frames per second extra-high frame rate, but those who did criticized it for being near impossible to watch. Avatar could overcome this hurdle by merit of being an almost exclusively effects-driven film, but that's a big if'.
Few directors have as much to prove as James Cameron. Despite his incredible achievements and record breaking profits, he's still rather easy to write off in the face of an industry that's already been there and done everything. With the planned four sequels to Avatar, he has many mountains to climb before needing to convince audiences to invest in 3D. The smart people say always bet on Cameron but his continued investment in 3D may signal a time where his reach far exceeds his grasp.
