There is nobody out there pushing this IP to the masses at the moment. But there will be. There will be. And then all the smack talkers on wdwmagic will have egg on their faces. Again.
Has everyone really forgotten the absolute craze around the first movie? (rhetorical).
And people still second guessing Cameron's ability to deliver.
Up is down. Down is up.
I have no doubt they will be just as pretty, if not prettier, than the first one.
But what the 2 or 3 Avatar fans on this board simply refuse to accept is that
the craze wasn't about Avatar. It was about 3-D.
3-D is nothing new, it's a fad that comes and goes. And, all accounts show - it's on it's way down again. Because of the machine in place and the availability of the technology, this time it will not likely disappear like it has before, but it's zeitgeist moment has passed. 3-D at home essentially failed - 2-3 years ago when the sets first started coming out, by now even skeptics like myself thought practically every TV would have it - yet as I discovered when buying a new TV, you can't even really get one at Wal-mart or Target anymore (they might have 1 or 2 high end models) and only the high-end TV's (in the five digits) even offer it any more.
What Cameron did was create a very pretty film at just the right time, marketed in a great way, and offered a new experience in terms of 3-D we hadn't seen before at a time when economic issues were keeping folks from even going to the theaters. It finally offered something "new" in terms of technology, something that even folks that would have never seen that film otherwise went to as an "event".
Culturally, though, nothing in the film has sustained any sort of interest. Part of that was Cameron's insistence of using the "Avatar" name - so generic, and when I saw Happy Meal toys offered a few months back for Avatar - it wasn't even
this Avatar.
Not one character made any impact enough for folks to even remember their name, not one line or scene has made it out in any sort of cultural reference, even amongst those who saw it. It didn't take a hold of a generation.
The land will succeed if it's done well, and has quality attractions, but it's not going to draw folks there
just because it's Avatar related, unlike Potter, Star Wars, etc..
One thing that Andy C mentions was how Twitter has changed the way the Disney fan community interacts and exchanges information and he is quite right about that. The sad thing is that he, and many others, think it changed for the better.
While I'm not one to throw stones at brevity (since I often err on the opposite side), what it has done overall (not just to Disney, but in general) has made the headline/hook the content. I'm all for attention-grabbing headlines or hooks to draw you in to something worth reading, I have a great appreciation for the art, but it's just so pithy and meaningless when it doesn't lead to actual content. It's not difficult to get folks to say "Oh yeah!" to 180-character or less sound bite, because you only convey such "yay" or "nay" divisive statements that way that it leads to no actual intelligent discourse.
TL;DR? It makes everyone think that every thought-fart is profound, and they have no fear of (or even ability to) having to back themselves up.
So a bunch of people who haven't posted on a message board in 7 years still know exactly what is posted here. Maybe they don't post, but they obviously still read here.
Of course they do. Everyone does. It's where most information that isn't directly leaked to a specific source on purpose comes from initially (i.e. Disney directly leaking NFL stuff to Jim Hill, who was notorious for taking a thread here and basically giving no additional information, just summarizing what we all had said and passing it off as an article).
I've also seen and heard enough times to know that PhotoDave isn't blowing smoke - you bet your behinds that various members of the Disney organization keep a close eye, as well. It's too long a story to tell now, but I had suspicions of a specific incident, that was confirmed to me years later that completely validated what I knew all along - while on one hand, yes, we are the "fanbois" so it would be foolish just to take our opinions and run with it - on the other hand, we also have a lot of valuable information here that they can find very, very useful when it comes to things they couldn't tell from their surveys and metrics alone.
