Avatar Coming To Disney World. James Cameron To Get Incrementally Richer.
In an effort to beef up their theme parks, Disney has bought exclusive global theme park rights to the mega hit movie “Avatar.”
In a new Disney Theme area, park-goers could conceivably be riding high in sky like Avatar’s ‘Na’vi’ tribe.
Avatar will become an entire ‘land’ in Walt Disney World’s Animal Kingdom. (Not Magic Kingdom, Hollywood Studios or Epcot.) Animal Kingdom already has a magical forest-like quality, but up to now hasn’t had a marquis attraction that carries the kind of cache that the film Avatar has: the film sold $2.8 billion in tickets at the global box office. The company’s Hollywood Studios might have seemed like a good fit, but doesn’t have the space needed to create an area as vast as the one that is planned. Animal Kingdom will utilize the movie’s focus around the theme of mankind’s responsibility to nature as a thread tying it to the park.
The themed area will have rides, shops restaurants, and likely some sort of entertainment. The planning has just started, and contruction won’t begin until 2013, meaning that it won’t be opened until 2016. Two Avatar sequels are already reportedly in the works, one debuting in 2014, and another in 2015, so there’s still going to be plenty of buzz surrounding the brand. (Is Cameron going for a Star Wars trilogy type of thing?)
20th Century Fox and James Cameron, the director of “Avatar,” will receive a licensing fee and a percentage of related merchandise and food and beverage sales from the themed area. That’s right. Every time someone buys a soda, James Cameron will get a little cash in his piggy bank! This guy could live on these licensing rights alone! I’m dying a little.
