title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: "Avatar" premiered in London on , 2009 and was released in the United States on to positive reviews. Critics highly praised its groundbreaking visual effects, direction, cinematography, and musical score, while criticism was directed towards its screenplay, story, and lengthy runtime. During its theatrical run, the film broke several box office records and became the highest-grossing film at the time, as well as in the United States and Canada, surpassing Cameron's "Titanic", which had held those records for twelve years. "Avatar" remained the highest-grossing film in the world for nearly a decade until it was overtaken by "" in 2019, but a Chinese re-release of "Avatar" led to the film retaking the worldwide top spot in March 2021, where it has been ever since. Adjusted for inflation, "Avatar" is the second-highest-grossing movie of all time after "Gone with the Wind", with a total of more than $3 billion. It also became the first film to gross more than and the best-selling video title of 2010 in the United States. "Avatar" was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won three, for Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, and Best Visual Effects. The success of the film also led to electronics manufacturers releasing 3D televisions and caused 3D films to increase in popularity.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Following the film's success, Cameron signed with 20th Century Fox to produce four sequels. The first sequel, "" was released on December 16, 2022, to identical reviews, but also noting its improvements, and "Avatar 3" has completed principal filming and will be released in 2024. Further sequels are scheduled for release in 2026 and in 2028. Several cast members returned, including Worthington, Saldana, Lang, and Weaver.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: In 2154, the natural resources of the Earth have been depleted. The Resources Development Administration (RDA) mines the valuable mineral unobtanium on Pandora, a moon in the Alpha Centauri star system. Pandora, whose atmosphere is mostly gaseous, is inhabited by the Na'vi, , blue-skinned, sapient humanoids that live in harmony with nature. To explore Pandora, genetically matched human scientists use Na'vi-human hybrids called "avatars". Paraplegic Marine Jake Sully is sent to Pandora to replace his deceased identical twin, who had signed up to be an operator. Avatar Program head Dr. Grace Augustine considers Sully inadequate but accepts him as a bodyguard.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: While escorting the avatars of Grace and Dr. Norm Spellman, Jake's avatar is attacked by Pandoran wildlife and he flees into the forest, where he is rescued by female Na'vi Neytiri. Witnessing an auspicious sign, she takes him to her clan. Neytiri's mother Mo'at, the spiritual leader of the clan, orders her daughter to initiate Jake into their society. Colonel Miles Quaritch, head of RDA's security force, promises Jake that the company will restore the use of his legs if he provides information about the Na'vi and their gathering place, the giant Hometree, under which is a rich deposit of unobtanium. Learning of this, Grace transfers herself, Jake, and Norm to an outpost. Jake and Neytiri fall in love as Jake is initiated into the tribe. He and Neytiri choose each other as mates. When Jake attempts to disable a bulldozer which is threatening a sacred Na'vi site, Administrator Parker Selfridge orders Hometree destroyed. Despite Grace's argument that destroying Hometree could damage Pandora's biological neural network, Selfridge gives Jake and Grace one hour to convince the Na'vi to evacuate.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Jake confesses that he was a spy and the Na'vi take him and Grace captive. Quaritch's men destroy Hometree, killing many including Neytiri's father, the clan chief. Mo'at frees Jake and Grace, but they are detached from their avatars and imprisoned by Quaritch's forces. Pilot Trudy Chacón, disgusted by Quaritch's brutality, airlifts Jake, Grace, and Norm to Grace's outpost. Grace is shot during the escape. Jake regains the Na'vi's trust by connecting his mind to that of Toruk, a dragon-like creature feared and revered by the Na'vi. At the sacred Tree of Souls, Jake pleads with Mo'at to heal Grace. The clan attempts to transfer Grace into her avatar with the aid of the Tree of Souls but she dies. Supported by new chief Tsu'tey, Jake unites the clan, telling them to gather all the clans to battle the RDA. Quaritch organizes a strike against the Tree of Souls to demoralize the Na'vi. Jake prays to Na'vi deity Eywa via a neural connection with the Tree of Souls. Tsu'tey and Trudy are among the battle's heavy casualties.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: The Na'vi are rescued when Pandoran wildlife unexpectedly join the attack and overwhelm the humans, which Neytiri interprets as Eywa answering Jake's prayer. Quaritch, wearing an AMP suit, escapes his crashed aircraft and breaks open the avatar link unit containing Jake's human body, exposing it to Pandora's poisonous atmosphere. As Quaritch prepares to slit Jake's avatar's throat, he is killed by Neytiri who saves Jake from suffocation, seeing his human form for the first time. With the exceptions of Jake, Norm, and a select few others, all humans are expelled from Pandora. Jake is permanently transferred into his avatar with the aid of the Tree of Souls.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: In 1994, director James Cameron wrote an 80-page treatment for "Avatar", drawing inspiration from "every single science fiction book" he had read in his childhood as well as from adventure novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard. In , Cameron announced that after completing "Titanic", he would film "Avatar", which would make use of synthetic, or computer-generated, actors. The project would cost $100 million and involve at least six actors in leading roles "who appear to be real but do not exist in the physical world". Visual effects house Digital Domain, with whom Cameron has a partnership, joined the project, which was supposed to begin production in mid-1997 for a 1999 release. However, Cameron felt that the technology had not caught up with the story and vision that he intended to tell. He decided to concentrate on making documentaries and refining the technology for the next few years. It was revealed in a "Bloomberg BusinessWeek" cover story that 20th Century Fox had fronted $10 million to Cameron to film a proof-of-concept clip for "Avatar", which he showed to Fox executives in .


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: In February 2006, Cameron revealed that his film "Project 880" was "a retooled version of "Avatar"", a film that he had tried to make years earlier, citing the technological advances in the creation of the computer-generated characters Gollum, King Kong, and Davy Jones. Cameron had chosen "Avatar" over his project "" after completing a five-day camera test in the previous year.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: From January to April 2006, Cameron worked on the script and developed a culture for the film's aliens, the Na'vi. Their language was created by Dr. Paul Frommer, a linguist at USC. The Na'vi language has a lexicon of about 1000 words, with some 30 added by Cameron. The tongue's phonemes include ejective consonants (such as the "kx" in "skxawng") that are found in Amharic, and the initial "ng" that Cameron may have taken from Te Reo Māori. Actress Sigourney Weaver and the film's set designers met with Jodie S. Holt, professor of plant physiology at University of California, Riverside, to learn about the methods used by botanists to study and sample plants, and to discuss ways to explain the communication between Pandora's organisms depicted in the film.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: From 2005 to 2007, Cameron worked with a handful of designers, including famed fantasy illustrator Wayne Barlowe and renowned concept artist Jordu Schell, to shape the design of the Na'vi with paintings and physical sculptures when Cameron felt that 3-D brush renderings were not capturing his vision, often working together in the kitchen of Cameron's Malibu home. In , Cameron announced that he would film "Avatar" for a mid-2008 release and planned to begin principal photography with an established cast by . The following August, the visual effects studio Weta Digital signed on to help Cameron produce "Avatar". Stan Winston, who had collaborated with Cameron in the past, joined "Avatar" to help with the film's designs. Production design for the film took several years. The film had two different production designers, and two separate art departments, one of which focused on the flora and fauna of Pandora, and another that created human machines and human factors. In , Cameron was announced to be using his own Reality Camera System to film in 3-D. The system would use two high-definition cameras in a single camera body to create depth perception.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: While these preparations were underway, Fox kept wavering in its commitment to "Avatar" because of its painful experience with cost overruns and delays on Cameron's previous picture, "Titanic", even though Cameron rewrote the script to combine several characters together and offered to cut his fee in case the film flopped. Cameron installed a traffic light with the amber signal lit outside of co-producer Jon Landau's office to represent the film's uncertain future. In mid-2006, Fox told Cameron "in no uncertain terms that they were passing on this film," so he began shopping it around to other studios and approached Walt Disney Studios, showing his proof of concept to then chairman Dick Cook. However, when Disney attempted to take over, Fox exercised its right of first refusal. In , Fox finally agreed to commit to making "Avatar" after Ingenious Media agreed to back the film, which reduced Fox's financial exposure to less than half of the film's official $237 million budget. After Fox accepted "Avatar", one skeptical Fox executive shook his head and told Cameron and Landau, "I don't know if we're crazier for letting you do this, or if you're crazier for thinking you "can" do this ..."


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: In December 2006, Cameron described "Avatar" as "a futuristic tale set on a planet 200 years hence ... an old-fashioned jungle adventure with an environmental conscience [that] aspires to a mythic level of storytelling". The press release described the film as "an emotional journey of redemption and revolution" and said the story is of "a wounded former Marine, thrust unwillingly into an effort to settle and exploit an exotic planet rich in biodiversity, who eventually crosses over to lead the indigenous race in a battle for survival". The story would be of an entire world complete with an ecosystem of phantasmagorical plants and creatures, and native people with a rich culture and language.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Estimates put the cost of the film at about $280–310 million to produce and an estimated $150 million for marketing, noting that about $30 million in tax credits would lessen the financial impact on the studio and its financiers. A studio spokesperson said that the budget was "$237 million, with $150 million for promotion, end of story."


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: "Avatar" is primarily an action-adventure journey of self-discovery, in the context of imperialism, and deep ecology.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Cameron said his inspiration was "every single science fiction book I read as a kid" and that he wanted to update the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "John Carter" series. He acknowledged that "Avatar" shares themes with the films "At Play in the Fields of the Lord", "The Emerald Forest", and "Princess Mononoke", which feature clashes between cultures and civilizations, and with "Dances with Wolves", where a battered soldier finds himself drawn to the culture he was initially fighting against. He also cited Hayao Miyazaki's anime films such as "Princess Mononoke" as an influence on the ecosystem of Pandora.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: genesis of the ideas, themes, storylines, and images that came to be "Avatar"." In addition to historical events (such as European colonization of the Americas), his life experiences and several of his unproduced projects, Cameron drew connections between "Avatar" and his previous films. He cited his script and concept art for "Xenogenesis", partially produced as a short film, as being the basis for many of the ideas and visual designs in "Avatar". He stated that "Avatar" "concepts of a world mind, intelligence within nature, the idea of projecting force or consciousness using an avatar, colonization of alien planets, greedy corporate interests backed up by military force, the story of a seemingly weaker group prevailing over a technologically superior force, and the good scientist were all established and recurrent themes" from his earlier films including "Aliens", "The Abyss", "", "The Terminator" and "". He specifically mentioned the "water tentacle" in "The Abyss" as an example of an "avatar" that "takes on the appearance of...an alien life form...in order to bridge the cultural gap and build trust."


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Cameron also cited a number of works by other creators as "reference points and sources of inspiration" for "Avatar". These include two of his "favorite" films, "", where mankind experiences an evolution after meeting alien life, and "Lawrence of Arabia", where "an outsider...encounters and immerses into a foreign culture and then ultimately joins that group to fight other outsiders." Cameron said he became familiar with the concept of a human operating a "synthetic avatar" inside another world from George Henry Smith's short story "In the Imagicon" and Arthur C. Clarke's novel "The City and the Stars". He said he learned of the term "avatar" by reading the cyberpunk novels "Neuromancer" by William Gibson and "Islands in the Net" by Bruce Sterling. The idea of a "world mind" originated in the novel "Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem. Cameron mentioned several other films about people interacting with "indigenous cultures" as inspiring him, including "Dances with Wolves", "The Man Who Would Be King", "The Mission", "The Emerald Forest", "Medicine Man", "The Jungle Book" and "". He also cited as inspiration the John Carter and Tarzan stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs and other adventure stories by Rudyard Kipling and H. Rider Haggard.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: In a 2007 interview with "Time" magazine, Cameron was asked about the meaning of the term "Avatar", to which he replied, "It's an incarnation of one of the Hindu gods taking a flesh form. In this film what that means is that the human technology in the future is capable of injecting a human's intelligence into a remotely located body, a biological body." Cameron also cited the Japanese cyberpunk manga and anime "Ghost in the Shell", in terms of how humans can remotely control, and transfer their personalities into, alien bodies.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: The look of the Na'vi – the humanoids indigenous to Pandora – was inspired by a dream that Cameron's mother had, long before he started work on "Avatar". In her dream, she saw a blue-skinned woman 12 feet () tall, which he thought was "kind of a cool image". Also he said, "I just like blue. It's a good color ... plus, there's a connection to the Hindu deities, which I like conceptually." He included similar creatures in his first screenplay (written in 1976 or 1977), which featured a planet with a native population of "gorgeous" tall blue aliens. The Na'vi were based on them.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: For the love story between characters Jake and Neytiri, Cameron applied a star-crossed love theme, which he said was in the tradition of Romeo and Juliet. He acknowledged its similarity to the pairing of Jack and Rose from his film "Titanic." An interviewer stated, "Both couples come from radically different cultures that are contemptuous of their relationship and are forced to choose sides between the competing communities." Cameron described Neytiri as his "Pocahontas," saying that his plotline followed the historical story of a "white outsider [who] falls in love with the chief's daughter, who becomes his guide to the tribe and to their special bond with nature." Cameron felt that whether or not the Jake and Neytiri love story would be perceived as believable partially hinged on the physical attractiveness of Neytiri's alien appearance, which was developed by considering her appeal to the all-male crew of artists. Although Cameron felt Jake and Neytiri do not fall in love right away, their portrayers (Worthington and Saldana) felt the characters did. Cameron said the two actors "had a great chemistry" during filming.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: For the film's floating "Hallelujah Mountains", the designers drew inspiration from "many different types of mountains, but mainly the karst limestone formations in China." According to production designer Dylan Cole, the fictional floating rocks were inspired by Huangshan (also known as Yellow Mountain), Guilin, Zhangjiajie, among others around the world. Cameron had noted the influence of the Chinese peaks on the design of the floating mountains.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: To create the interiors of the human mining colony on Pandora, production designers visited the "Noble Clyde Boudreaux" oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico during . They photographed, measured and filmed every aspect of the platform, which was later replicated on-screen with photorealistic CGI during post-production.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Cameron said that he wanted to make "something that has this spoonful of sugar of all the action and the adventure and all that" but also have a conscience "that maybe in the enjoying of it makes you think a little bit about the way you interact with nature and your fellow man". He added that "the Na'vi represent something that is our higher selves, or our aspirational selves, what we would like to think we are" and that even though there are good humans within the film, the humans "represent what we know to be the parts of ourselves that are trashing our world and maybe condemning ourselves to a grim future".


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Cameron acknowledges that "Avatar" implicitly criticizes the United States' role in the Iraq War and the impersonal nature of mechanized warfare in general. In reference to the use of the term "shock and awe" in the film, Cameron said, "We know what it feels like to launch the missiles. We don't know what it feels like for them to land on our home soil, not in America." He said in later interviews, "... I think it's very patriotic to question a system that needs to be corralled ..." and, "The film is definitely not anti-American."


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: A scene in the film portrays the violent destruction of the towering Na'vi Hometree, which collapses in flames after a missile attack, coating the landscape with ash and floating embers. Asked about the scene's resemblance to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Cameron said he had been "surprised at how much it did look like ".


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Principal photography for "Avatar" began in in Los Angeles and Wellington. Cameron described the film as a hybrid with a full live-action shoot in combination with computer-generated characters and live environments. "Ideally at the end of the day the audience has no idea which they're looking at," Cameron said. The director indicated that he had already worked four months on nonprincipal scenes for the film. The live action was shot with a modified version of the proprietary digital 3-D Fusion Camera System, developed by Cameron and Vince Pace. In , Fox had announced that 3-D filming for "Avatar" would be done at 24 frames per second despite Cameron's strong opinion that a 3-D film requires higher frame rate to make strobing less noticeable. According to Cameron, the film is composed of 60% computer-generated elements and 40% live action, as well as traditional miniatures.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Motion-capture photography lasted 31 days at the Hughes Aircraft stage in Playa Vista in Los Angeles. Live action photography began in at Stone Street Studios in Wellington and was scheduled to last 31 days. More than a thousand people worked on the production. In preparation of the filming sequences, all of the actors underwent professional training specific to their characters such as archery, horseback riding, firearm use, and hand-to-hand combat. They received language and dialect training in the Na'vi language created for the film. Before shooting the film, Cameron also sent the cast to the Hawaiian tropical rainforests to get a feel for a rainforest setting before shooting on the soundstage.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: During filming, Cameron made use of his virtual camera system, a new way of directing motion-capture filmmaking. The system shows the actors' virtual counterparts in their digital surroundings in real time, allowing the director to adjust and direct scenes just as if shooting live action. According to Cameron, "It's like a big, powerful game engine. If I want to fly through space, or change my perspective, I can. I can turn the whole scene into a living miniature and go through it on a 50 to 1 scale." Using conventional techniques, the complete virtual world cannot be seen until the motion-capture of the actors is complete. Cameron said this process does not diminish the value or importance of acting. On the contrary, because there is no need for repeated camera and lighting setups, costume fittings and make-up touch-ups, scenes do not need to be interrupted repeatedly. Cameron described the system as a "form of pure creation where if you want to move a tree or a mountain or the sky or change the time of day, you have complete control over the elements".


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Cameron gave fellow directors Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson a chance to test the new technology. Spielberg said, "I like to think of it as digital makeup, not augmented animation ... Motion capture brings the director back to a kind of intimacy that actors and directors only know when they're working in live theater." Spielberg and George Lucas were also able to visit the set to watch Cameron direct with the equipment.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: To film the shots where CGI interacts with live action, a unique camera referred to as a "simulcam" was used, a merger of the 3-D fusion camera and the virtual camera systems. While filming live action in real time with the simulcam, the CGI images captured with the virtual camera or designed from scratch, are superimposed over the live action images as in augmented reality and shown on a small monitor, making it possible for the director to instruct the actors how to relate to the virtual material in the scene.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Due to Cameron's personal convictions about climate change, he allowed only plant-based (vegan) food to be served on set.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: A number of innovative visual effects techniques were used during production. According to Cameron, work on the film had been delayed since the 1990s to allow the techniques to reach the necessary degree of advancement to adequately portray his vision of the film. The director planned to make use of photorealistic computer-generated characters, created using new motion capture animation technologies he had been developing in the 14 months leading up to .


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Innovations include a new system for lighting massive areas like Pandora's jungle, a motion-capture stage or "volume" six times larger than any previously used, and an improved method of capturing facial expressions, enabling full performance capture. To achieve the face capturing, actors wore individually made skull caps fitted with a tiny camera positioned in front of the actors' faces; the information collected about their facial expressions and eyes is then transmitted to computers. According to Cameron, the method allows the filmmakers to transfer 100% of the actors' physical performances to their digital counterparts.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Besides the performance capture data which were transferred directly to the computers, numerous reference cameras gave the digital artists multiple angles of each performance. A technically challenging scene was near the end of the film when the computer-generated Neytiri held the live action Jake in human form, and attention was given to the details of the shadows and reflected light between them.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: The lead visual effects company was Weta Digital in Wellington, at one point employing 900 people to work on the film. Because of the huge amount of data which needed to be stored, cataloged and available for everybody involved, even on the other side of the world, a new cloud computing and Digital Asset Management (DAM) system named Gaia was created by Microsoft especially for "Avatar", which allowed the crews to keep track of and coordinate all stages in the digital processing. To render "Avatar", Weta used a server farm making use of 4,000 Hewlett-Packard servers with 35,000 processor cores with 104 terabytes of RAM and three petabytes of network area storage running Ubuntu Linux, Grid Engine cluster manager, and 2 of the animation software and managers, Pixar's RenderMan and Pixar's Alfred queue management system. The render farm occupies the 193rd to 197th spots in the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. A new texturing and paint software system, called Mari, was developed by The Foundry in cooperation with Weta. Creating the Na'vi characters and the virtual world of Pandora required over a petabyte of digital storage, and each minute of the final footage for "Avatar" occupies 17.28 gigabytes of storage. It would often take the computer several hours to render a single frame of the film. To help finish preparing the special effects sequences on time, a number of other companies were brought on board, including Industrial Light & Magic, which worked alongside Weta Digital to create the battle sequences. ILM was responsible for the visual effects for many of the film's specialized vehicles and devised a new way to make CGI explosions. Joe Letteri was the film's visual effects general supervisor.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Composer James Horner scored the film, his third collaboration with Cameron after "Aliens" and "Titanic". Horner recorded parts of the score with a small chorus singing in the alien language Na'vi in .


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: He also worked with Wanda Bryant, an ethnomusicologist, to create a music culture for the alien race.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: The first scoring sessions were planned to take place in early 2009. During production, Horner promised Cameron that he would not work on any other project except for "Avatar" and reportedly worked on the score from four in the morning until ten at night throughout the process. He stated in an interview, ""Avatar" has been the most difficult film I have worked on and the biggest job I have undertaken." Horner composed the score as two different scores merged into one. He first created a score that reflected the Na'vi way of sound and then combined it with a separate "traditional" score to drive the film.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: British singer Leona Lewis was chosen to sing the theme song for the film, called "I See You". An accompanying music video, directed by Jake Nava, premiered , 2009, on MySpace.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: The first photo of the film was released on , 2009, and "Empire" released exclusive images from the film in its October issue. Cameron, producer Jon Landau, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, and Sigourney Weaver appeared at a panel, moderated by Tom Rothman, at the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con on . Twenty-five minutes of footage was screened in Dolby 3D.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Weaver and Cameron appeared at additional panels to promote the film, speaking on the 23rd and 24th respectively. James Cameron announced at the Comic-Con Avatar Panel that will be 'Avatar Day'. On this day, the trailer was released in all theatrical formats. The official game trailer and toy line of the film were also unveiled on this day.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: The new 210-second trailer was premiered in theaters on , 2009, then soon after premiered online on Yahoo! on , 2009, to positive reviews.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: An extended version in IMAX 3D received overwhelmingly positive reviews. "The Hollywood Reporter" said that audience expectations were colored by "the [same] establishment skepticism that preceded "Titanic"" and suggested the showing reflected the desire for original storytelling. The teaser has been among the most viewed trailers in the history of film marketing, reaching the first place of all trailers viewed on Apple.com with 4 million views.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: On October 30, to celebrate the opening of the first 3-D cinema in Vietnam, Fox allowed Megastar Cinema to screen exclusive 16 minutes of Avatar to a number of press. The three-and-a-half-minute trailer of the film premiered live on , 2009, during a Dallas Cowboys football game at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, on the Diamond Vision screen, one of the world's largest video displays, and to TV audiences viewing the game on Fox. It is said to be the largest live motion picture trailer viewing in history.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: The Coca-Cola Company collaborated with Fox to launch a worldwide marketing campaign to promote the film. The highlight of the campaign was the website AVTR.com. Specially marked bottles and cans of Coca-Cola Zero, when held in front of a webcam, enabled users to interact with the website's 3-D features using augmented reality (AR) technology. The film was heavily promoted in an episode of the Fox series "Bones" in the episode "The Gamer In The Grease" (Season 5, Episode 9). "Avatar" star Joel David Moore has a recurring role on the program, and is seen in the episode anxiously awaiting the release of the film. A week prior to the American release, Zoe Saldana promoted the film on Adult Swim when she was interviewed by an animated Space Ghost. McDonald's had a promotion mentioned in television commercials in Europe called "Avatarize yourself", which encouraged people to go to the website set up by Oddcast, and use a photograph of themselves to change into a Na'vi.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: "Avatar: A Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora", a 224-page book in the form of a field guide to the film's fictional setting of the planet of Pandora, was released by Harper Entertainment on , 2009.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: It is presented as a compilation of data collected by the humans about Pandora and the life on it, written by Maria Wilhelm and Dirk Mathison. HarperFestival also released Wilhelm's 48-page "James Cameron's Avatar: The Reusable Scrapbook" for children. "The Art of Avatar" was released on , 2009, by Abrams Books. The book features detailed production artwork from the film, including production sketches, illustrations by Lisa Fitzpatrick, and film stills. Producer Jon Landau wrote the foreword, Cameron wrote the epilogue, and director Peter Jackson wrote the preface. In , Abrams Books also released "The Making of Avatar", a 272-page book that detailed the film's production process and contains over 500 color photographs and illustrations.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: In a 2009 interview, Cameron said that he planned to write a novel version of "Avatar" after the film was released. In , producer Jon Landau stated that Cameron plans a prequel novel for "Avatar" that will "lead up to telling the story of the movie, but it would go into much more depth about all the stories that we didn't have time to deal with", saying that "Jim wants to write a novel that is a big, epic story that fills in a lot of things". In August 2013 it was announced that Cameron hired Steven Gould to pen four standalone novels to expand the "Avatar" universe.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Cameron chose Ubisoft Montreal to create an "Avatar" game for the film in 2007. The filmmakers and game developers collaborated heavily, and Cameron decided to include some of Ubisoft's vehicle and creature designs in the film.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: "James Cameron's Avatar: The Game" was released on , 2009, for most home video game consoles (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii, Nintendo DS, iPhone) and Microsoft Windows, and for PlayStation Portable. A second game, "", was under development as of 2021.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Mattel Toys announced in December 2009 that it would be introducing a line of "Avatar" action figures.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Each action figure will be made with a 3-D web tag, called an i-TAG, that consumers can scan using a web cam, revealing unique on-screen content that is exclusive to each specific action figure. A series of toys representing six different characters from the film were also distributed globally in McDonald's Happy Meals.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: In December 2009, France Post released a special limited edition stamp based on "Avatar", coinciding with the film's worldwide release.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: "Avatar" premiered in London on , 2009, and was released theatrically worldwide from to 18. The film was originally set for release on , 2009, during filming but was pushed back to allow more post-production time (the last shots were delivered in November) and give more time for theaters worldwide to install 3D projectors. Cameron stated that the film's aspect ratio would be 1.78:1 for 3D screenings and that a 2.39:1 image would be extracted for 2D screenings. However, a 3D 2.39:1 extract was approved for use with constant-image-height screens (i.e., screens that increase in width to display 2.39:1 films). During a 3D preview showing in Germany on , the movie's DRM "protection" system failed, and some copies delivered could not be watched at all in the theaters. The problems were fixed in time for the public premiere. "Avatar" was released in a total of 3,457 theaters in the US, of which 2,032 theaters ran it in 3D. In total, 90% of all advance ticket sales for "Avatar" were for 3D screenings.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Internationally, "Avatar" opened on a total of 14,604 screens in 106 territories, of which 3,671 were showing the film in 3D (producing 56% of the first weekend gross). The film was simultaneously presented in IMAX 3D format, opening in 178 theaters in the United States on . The international IMAX release included 58 theaters beginning on , and 25 more theaters were to be added in the coming weeks. The IMAX release was the company's widest to date, a total of 261 theaters worldwide. The previous IMAX record opening was "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince", which opened in 161 IMAX theaters in the US, and about 70 international. 20th Century Fox Korea adapted and later released "Avatar" in 4D version, which included "moving seats, smells of explosives, sprinkling water, laser lights and wind".


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: "Avatar" was released internationally on more than 14,000 screens. It earned $3,537,000 from midnight screenings domestically (United States and Canada), with the initial 3D release limited to 2,200 screens. The film earned $26,752,099 on its opening day, and $77,025,481 over its opening weekend, making it the second-largest December opening ever behind "I Am Legend", the largest domestic opening weekend for a film not based on a franchise (topping "The Incredibles"), the highest opening weekend for a film entirely in 3D (breaking "Up"s record), the highest opening weekend for an environmentalist film (breaking "The Day After Tomorrow"s record), and the 40th-largest opening weekend in North America, despite a blizzard that blanketed the East Coast of the United States and reportedly hurt its opening weekend results. The film also set an IMAX opening weekend record, with 178 theaters generating approximately $9.5 million, 12% of the film's $77 million (at the time) North American gross on less than 3% of the screens.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: International markets generating opening weekend tallies of at least $10 million were for Russia ($19.7 million), France ($17.4 million), the UK ($13.8 million), Germany ($13.3 million), South Korea ($11.7 million), Australia ($11.5 million), and Spain ($11.0 million). "Avatar"s worldwide gross was US$241.6 million after five days, the ninth largest opening-weekend gross of all time, and the largest for a non-franchise, non-sequel and original film. 58 international IMAX screens generated an estimated $4.1 million during the opening weekend.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Revenues in the film's second weekend decreased by only 1.8% in domestic markets, marking a rare occurrence, earning $75,617,183, to remain in first place at the box office and recording what was then the biggest second weekend of all time. The film experienced another marginal decrease in revenue in its third weekend, dropping 9.4% to $68,490,688 domestically, remaining in first place at the box office, to set a third-weekend record.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: "Avatar" crossed the $1 billion mark on the 19th day of its international release, making it the first film to reach this mark in only 19 days. It became the fifth film grossing more than $1 billion worldwide, and the only film of 2009 to do so. In its fourth weekend, "Avatar" continued to lead the box office domestically, setting a new all-time fourth-weekend record of $50,306,217, and becoming the highest-grossing 2009 release in the United States. In the film's fifth weekend, it set the Martin Luther King Day weekend record, grossing $54,401,446, and set a fifth-weekend record with a take of $42,785,612. It held the top spot to set the sixth and seventh weekend records earning $34,944,081 and $31,280,029 respectively. It was the fastest film to gross $600 million domestically, on its 47th day in theaters.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: On , it became the first film to earn over worldwide, and it became the first film to gross over in the U.S. and Canada, on , after 72 days of release. It remained at number one at the domestic box office for seven consecutive weeks – the most consecutive No. 1 weekends since "Titanic" spent 15 weekends at No.1 in 1997 and 1998 – and also spent 11 consecutive weekends at the top of the box office outside the United States and Canada, breaking the record of nine consecutive weekends set by "". By the end of its first theatrical release "Avatar" had grossed $749,766,139 in the U.S. and Canada, and $ in other territories, for a worldwide total of $.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Including the revenue from a re-release of "Avatar" featuring extended footage, "Avatar" grossed $785,221,649 in the U.S. and Canada, and $2,137,696,265 in other countries for a worldwide total of $2,922,917,914. "Avatar" has set a number of box office records during its release: on , 2010, it surpassed "Titanic"s worldwide gross to become the highest-grossing film of all time worldwide 41 days after its international release, just two days after taking the foreign box office record. On , 47 days after its domestic release, "Avatar" surpassed "Titanic" to become the highest-grossing film of all time in Canada and the United States. It became the highest-grossing film of all time in at least 30 other countries and is the first film to earn over $2 billion in foreign box office receipts.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: IMAX ticket sales account for $243.3 million of its worldwide gross, more than double the previous record. By 2022, this figure rose to $268.6 million.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Box Office Mojo estimates that after adjusting for the rise in average ticket prices, "Avatar" would be the 14th-highest-grossing film of all time in North America. Box Office Mojo also observes that the higher ticket prices for 3D and IMAX screenings have had a significant impact on "Avatar"s gross; it estimated, on , 2010, that "Avatar" had sold approximately tickets in North American theaters, more than any other film since 1999's "". On a worldwide basis, when "Avatar"s gross stood at $2 billion just 35 days into its run, "The Daily Telegraph" estimated its gross was surpassed by only "Gone with the Wind" ($3.0 billion), "Titanic" ($2.9 billion), and "Star Wars" ($2.2 billion) after adjusting for inflation to 2010 prices, with "Avatar" ultimately winding up with $2.92 billion after subsequent re-releases. Reuters even placed it ahead of "Titanic" after adjusting the global total for inflation. The 2015 edition of Guinness World Records lists Avatar only behind "Gone with the Wind" in terms of adjusted grosses worldwide.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Before its release, various film critics and fan communities predicted the film would be a significant disappointment at the box office, in line with predictions made for Cameron's previous blockbuster "Titanic". This criticism ranged from "Avatar"s film budget, to its concept and use of 3-D "blue cat people". "Slate" magazine's Daniel Engber complimented the 3D effects but criticized them for reminding him of certain CGI characters from the "Star Wars" prequel films and for having the "uncanny valley" effect. "The New York Times" noted that 20th Century Fox executives had decided to release "" alongside "Avatar", calling it a "secret weapon" to cover any unforeseeable losses at the box office.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Box office analysts, on the other hand, estimated that the film would be a box office success. "The holy grail of 3-D has finally arrived," said an analyst for Exhibitor Relations. "This is why all these 3-D venues were built: for "Avatar." This is the one. The behemoth." The "cautionary estimate" was that "Avatar" would bring in around $60 million in its opening weekend. Others guessed higher. There were also analysts who believed that the film's three-dimensionality would help its box office performance, given that recent 3D films had been successful.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Cameron said he felt the pressure of the predictions, but that pressure is good for film-makers. "It makes us think about our audiences and what the audience wants," he stated. "We owe them a good time. We owe them a piece of good entertainment." Although he felt "Avatar" would appeal to everyone and that the film could not afford to have a target demographic, he especially wanted hard-core science-fiction fans to see it: "If I can just get 'em in the damn theater, the film will act on them in the way it's supposed to, in terms of taking them on an amazing journey and giving them this rich emotional experience." Cameron was aware of the sentiment that "Avatar" would need significant "repeat business" just to make up for its budget and achieve box office success, and believed "Avatar" could inspire the same "sharing" reaction as "Titanic". He said that film worked because, "When people have an experience that's very powerful in the movie theatre, they want to go share it. They want to grab their friend and bring them, so that they can enjoy it. They want to be the person to bring them the news that this is something worth having in their life."


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: After the film's release and unusually strong box office performance over its first two weeks, it was debated as the one film capable of surpassing "Titanic"s worldwide gross, and its continued strength perplexed box office analysts. Other films in recent years had been cited as contenders for surpassing "Titanic", such as 2008's "The Dark Knight", but "Avatar" was considered the first film with a genuine chance to do so, and its numbers being aided by higher ticket prices for 3D screenings did not fully explain its success to box office analysts. "Most films are considered to be healthy if they manage anything less than a 50% drop from their first weekend to their second. Dipping just 11% from the first to the third is unheard of," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office analysis for Hollywood.com. "This is just unprecedented. I had to do a double take. I thought it was a miscalculation." Analysts predicted second place for the film's worldwide gross, but most were uncertain about it surpassing "Titanic" because "Today's films flame out much faster than they did when "Titanic" was released." Brandon Gray, president of Box Office Mojo, believed in the film's chances of becoming the highest-grossing film of all time, though he also believed it was too early to surmise because it had only played during the holidays. He said, "While "Avatar" may beat "Titanic"s record, it will be tough, and the film is unlikely to surpass "Titanic" in attendance. Ticket prices were about $3 cheaper in the late 1990s." Cameron said he did not think it was realistic to "try to topple "Titanic" off its perch" because it "just struck some kind of chord" and there had been other good films in recent years. He changed his prediction by mid-January. "It's gonna happen. It's just a matter of time," he said.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Although analysts have been unable to agree that "Avatar"s success is attributable to one primary factor, several explanations have been advanced. First, January is historically "the dumping ground for the year's weakest films", and this also applied to 2010.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Cameron himself said he decided to open the film in December so that it would have less competition from then to January. "Titanic" capitalized on the same January predictability, and earned most of its gross in 1998. Additionally, "Avatar" established itself as a "must-see" event. Gray said, "At this point, people who are going to see "Avatar" are going to see "Avatar" and would even if the slate was strong." Marketing the film as a "novelty factor" also helped. Fox positioned the film as a cinematic event that should be seen in the theaters. "It's really hard to sell the idea that you can have the same experience at home," stated David Mumpower, an analyst at BoxOfficeProphets.com. The "Oscar buzz" surrounding the film and international viewings helped. "Two-thirds of "Titanic"s haul was earned overseas, and "Avatar" [tracked] similarly ..."Avatar" opened in 106 markets globally and was No. 1 in all of them", and the markets "such as Russia, where "Titanic" saw modest receipts in 1997 and 1998, are white-hot today" with "more screens and moviegoers" than before.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: According to "Variety", films in 3D accumulated $1.3 billion in 2009, "a threefold increase over 2008 and more than 10% of the total 2009 box-office gross". The increased ticket price – an average of $2 to $3 per ticket in most markets – helped the film. Likewise, "Entertainment Weekly" attributed the film's success to 3D glasses but also to its "astronomic word-of-mouth". Not only do some theaters charge up to $18.50 for IMAX tickets, but "the buzz" created by the new technology was the possible cause for sold-out screenings. Gray said "Avatar" having no basis in previously established material makes its performance remarkable and even more impressive. "The movie might be derivative of many movies in its story and themes," he said, "but it had no direct antecedent like the other top-grossing films: "Titanic" (historical events), the "Star Wars" movies (an established film franchise), or "The Lord of the Rings" (literature). It was a tougher sell ..." "The Hollywood Reporter" estimated that after a combined production and promotion cost of between $387–437 million, the film turned a net profit of $1.2 billion.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, of reviews are positive, and the average rating is . The site's consensus reads, "It might be more impressive on a technical level than as a piece of storytelling, but "Avatar" reaffirms James Cameron's singular gift for imaginative, absorbing filmmaking." On Metacritic — which assigns a weighted mean score — the film has a score of 83 out of 100 based on 35 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale. Every demographic surveyed was reported to give this rating. These polls also indicated that the main draw of the film was its use of 3D.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times" called the film "extraordinary" and gave it four stars out of four. "Watching "Avatar", I felt sort of the same as when I saw "Star Wars" in 1977," he said, adding that like "Star Wars" and "", the film "employs a new generation of special effects" and it "is not simply a sensational entertainment, although it is that. It's a technical breakthrough. It has a flat-out Green and anti-war message".


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: A. O. Scott of "At The Movies" also compared his viewing of the film to the first time he viewed "Star Wars" and he said "although the script is a little bit ... obvious," it was "part of what made it work". Todd McCarthy of "Variety" praised the film, saying "The King of the World sets his sights on creating another world entirely in "Avatar", and it's very much a place worth visiting." Kirk Honeycutt of "The Hollywood Reporter" gave the film a positive review. "The screen is alive with more action and the soundtrack pops with more robust music than any dozen sci-fi shoot-'em-ups you care to mention," he stated. Peter Travers of "Rolling Stone" awarded "Avatar" a three-and-a-half out of four star rating and wrote in his print review "It extends the possibilities of what movies can do. Cameron's talent may just be as big as his dreams." Richard Corliss of "Time" magazine thought that the film was "the most vivid and convincing creation of a fantasy world ever seen in the history of moving pictures." Kenneth Turan of the "Los Angeles Times" thought the film has "powerful" visual accomplishments but "flat dialogue" and "obvious characterization". James Berardinelli of ReelViews praised the film and its story, giving it four out of four stars; he wrote "In 3-D, it's immersive – but the traditional film elements – story, character, editing, theme, emotional resonance, etc. – are presented with sufficient expertise to make even the 2-D version an engrossing -hour experience."


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: "Avatar"s underlying social and political themes attracted attention. Armond White of the "New York Press" wrote that Cameron used "villainous American characters" to "misrepresent facets of militarism, capitalism, and imperialism". Russell D. Moore of "The Christian Post" concluded that "propaganda exists in the film" and stated "If you can get a theater full of people in Kentucky to stand and applaud the defeat of their country in war, then you've got some amazing special effects." Adam Cohen of "The New York Times" was more positive about the film, calling its anti-imperialist message "a 22nd-century version of the American colonists vs. the British, India vs. the Raj, or Latin America vs. United Fruit". Ross Douthat of "The New York Times" opined that the film is "Cameron's long apologia for pantheism [...] Hollywood's religion of choice for a generation now", while Saritha Prabhu of "The Tennessean" called the film a "misportrayal of pantheism and Eastern spirituality in general", and Maxim Osipov of "The Hindustan Times", on the contrary, commended the film's message for its overall consistency with the teachings of Hinduism in the "Bhagavad Gita". Annalee Newitz of io9 concluded that "Avatar" is another film that has the recurring "fantasy about race" whereby "some white guy" becomes the "most awesome" member of a non-white culture. Michael Phillips of the "Chicago Tribune" called "Avatar" "the season's ideological Rorschach blot", while Miranda Devine of "The Sydney Morning Herald" thought that "It [was] impossible to watch Avatar without being banged over the head with the director's ideological hammer." Nidesh Lawtoo believed that an essential, yet less visible social theme that contributed to "Avatar"s success concerns contemporary fascinations with virtual avatars and "the transition from the world of reality to that of virtual reality".


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Critics and audiences have cited similarities with other films, literature or media, describing the perceived connections in ways ranging from simple "borrowing" to outright plagiarism. Ty Burr of "The Boston Globe" called it "the same movie" as "Dances with Wolves". Like "Dances with Wolves", "Avatar" has been characterized as being a "white savior" movie, in which a "backwards" native people is impotent without the leadership of a member of the invading white culture. Parallels to the concept and use of an avatar are in Poul Anderson's 1957 novelette "Call Me Joe", in which a paralyzed man uses his mind from orbit to control an artificial body on Jupiter. Cinema audiences in Russia have noted that "Avatar" has elements in common with the 1960s "Noon Universe" novels by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, which are set in the 22nd century on a forested world called Pandora with a sentient indigenous species called the Nave. Various reviews have compared "Avatar" to the films "", "Pocahontas" and "The Last Samurai." NPR's "Morning Edition" has compared the film to a montage of tropes, with one commentator stating that "Avatar" was made by "mixing a bunch of film scripts in a blender". Gary Westfahl wrote that "the science fiction story that most closely resembles "Avatar" has to be Ursula Le Guin's novella "The Word for World Is Forest" (1972), another epic about a benevolent race of alien beings who happily inhabit dense forests while living in harmony with nature until they are attacked and slaughtered by invading human soldiers who believe that the only good gook is a dead gook". The science fiction writer and editor Gardner Dozois said that along with the Anderson and Le Guin stories, the "mash-up" included Alan Dean Foster's 1975 novel, "Midworld". Some sources saw similarities to the artwork of Roger Dean, which features fantastic images of dragons and floating rock formations. In 2013, Dean sued Cameron and Fox, claiming that Pandora was inspired by 14 of his images. Dean sought damages of $50m. Dean's case was dismissed in 2014, and "The Hollywood Reporter" noted that Cameron had won multiple "Avatar" idea theft cases.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: "Avatar" received compliments from filmmakers, with Steven Spielberg praising it as "the most evocative and amazing science-fiction movie since "Star Wars"" and others calling it "audacious and awe inspiring", "master class", and "brilliant". Noted art director-turned-filmmaker Roger Christian is also a noted fan of the film. On the other hand, Duncan Jones said: "It's not in my top three James Cameron films. ... [A]t what point in the film did you have any doubt what was going to happen next?". For French filmmaker Luc Besson, "Avatar" opened the doors for him to now create an adaptation of the graphic novel series "Valérian and Laureline" that technologically supports the scope of its source material, with Besson even throwing his original script in the trash and redoing it after seeing the film. "TIME" ranked "Avatar" number 3 in their list of "The 10 Greatest Movies of the Millennium (Thus Far)" also earning it a spot on the magazine's All-Time 100 list, and IGN listed "Avatar" as number 22 on their list of the top 25 Sci-Fi movies of all time.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: "Avatar" won the 82nd Academy Awards for Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, and Best Visual Effects, and was nominated for a total of nine, including Best Picture and Best Director. "Avatar" also won the 67th Golden Globe Awards for Best Motion Picture – Drama and Best Director, and was nominated for two others. At the 36th Saturn Awards, "Avatar" won all ten awards it was nominated for: Best Science Fiction Film, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, Best Writing, Best Music, Best Production Design and Best Special Effects.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: The New York Film Critics Online honored the film with its Best Picture award. The film also won the Critics' Choice Awards of the Broadcast Film Critics Association for Best Action Film and several technical categories, out of nine nominations. It won two of the St. Louis Film Critics awards: Best Visual Effects and Most Original, Innovative or Creative Film. The film also won the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award for Production Design and Special Visual Effects, and was nominated for six others, including Best Film and Director. The film has received numerous other major awards, nominations and honors.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: In July 2010, Cameron confirmed that there would be an extended theatrical rerelease of the film on , 2010, exclusively in 3D theaters and IMAX 3D. "Avatar: Special Edition" includes an additional nine minutes of footage, all of which is CG, including an extension of the sex scene and various other scenes that were cut from the original theatrical film. This extended re-release resulted in the film's run time approaching the current IMAX platter maximum of 170 minutes, thereby leaving less time for the end credits. Cameron stated that the nine minutes of added scenes cost more than a minute to produce and finish. During its 12-week re-release, "Avatar: Special Edition" grossed an additional $10.74 million in North America and $22.46 million overseas for a worldwide total of $33.2 million.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment released the film on DVD and Blu-ray in the US on , 2010, and in the UK on . The US release was not on a Tuesday as is the norm, but was done to coincide with Earth Day. The first DVD and Blu-ray release does not contain any supplemental features other than the theatrical film and the disc menu in favor of and to make space for optimal picture and sound. The release also preserves the film's native 1.78:1 () format as Cameron felt that was the best format to watch the film. The Blu-ray disc contains DRM (BD+ 5) which some Blu-ray players might not support without a firmware update.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: "Avatar" set a first-day launch record in the U.S. for Blu-ray sales at 1.5 million units sold, breaking the record previously held by "The Dark Knight" (600,000 units sold). First-day DVD and Blu-ray sales combined were over four million units sold. In its first four days of release, sales of "Avatar" on Blu-ray reached 2.7 million in the United States and Canada – overtaking "The Dark Knight" to become the best ever selling Blu-ray release in the region. The release later broke the Blu-ray sales record in the UK the following week. In its first three weeks of release, the film sold a total of DVD and Blu-ray discs combined, a new record for sales in that period. As of , 2012, DVD sales (not including Blu-ray) totaled over units sold with in revenue. "Avatar" retained its record as the top-selling Blu-ray in the US market until January 2015, when it was surpassed by Disney's "Frozen".


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: The "Avatar" three-disc Extended Collector's Edition on DVD and Blu-ray was released on , 2010. Three different versions of the film are present on the discs: the original theatrical cut (162 minutes), the special edition cut (170 minutes), and a collector's extended cut (178 minutes). The DVD set spreads the film across two discs, while the Blu-ray set presents it on a single disc. The collector's extended cut contains 8 more minutes of footage, thus making it 16 minutes longer than the original theatrical cut. Cameron mentioned, "you can sit down, and in a continuous screening of the film, watch it with the Earth opening". He stated the "Earth opening" is an additional minutes of scenes that were in the film for much of its production but were ultimately cut before the film's theatrical release. The release also includes an additional 45 minutes of deleted scenes and other extras.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Cameron initially stated that "Avatar" would be released in 3D around , but the studio issued a correction: "3-D is in the conceptual stage and "Avatar" will not be out on 3D Blu-ray in November." In , Fox stated that the 3D version would be released some time in 2011. It was later revealed that Fox had given Panasonic an exclusive license for the 3D Blu-ray version and only with the purchase of a Panasonic 3DTV. The length of Panasonic's exclusivity period is stated to last until . On , Cameron stated that the standalone 3D Blu-ray would be the final version of the film's home release and that it was "maybe one, two years out". On Christmas Eve 2010, "Avatar" had its 3D television world premiere on Sky.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: On August 13, 2012, Cameron announced on Facebook that "Avatar" would be released globally on Blu-ray 3D. The Blu-ray 3D version was finally released on October 16, 2012.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: "Avatar" was re-released in theaters on September 23, 2022, by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures for a limited two week engagement, with the film being remastered in 4K high-dynamic range, with select scenes at a high frame rate of 48-frames-per-second. The reissue was prior to the December 2022 premiere of its sequel, "". Prior to this, Cameron previously teased a re-release of the film back in 2017 when promoting the Dolby Cinema re-release of "Titanic", stating that there were plans in the works to remaster the film with Dolby Vision and re-release it in Dolby Cinema.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Despite the film's financial and critical success, some journalists have questioned "Avatar"'s cultural impact or lack thereof. In 2014, Scott Mendelson of "Forbes" said the film had been "all but forgotten", citing the lack of merchandising, a fandom for the film, or any long-enduring media franchise, and further stated that he believed most general audiences could not remember any of the film's details, such as the names of its characters or actors in the cast. Mendelson argued "Avatar"'s only achievement of note to be its popularization of 3D cinema. Despite this, he still felt it was a quality film, saying, "A great blockbuster movie can just be a great blockbuster movie without capturing the lunchbox market." He further reflected and reversed his stance in 2022 after the box office success of the re-release, saying, "The very things that made "Avatar" sometimes feel like a 'forgotten blockbuster' have inspired a skewed renewed nostalgia for its singular existence. It was just a movie, an original auteur-specific movie that prioritized top-shelf filmmaking and clockwork plotting over quotable dialogue and memes."


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Some have questioned if there is an audience for the film's planned sequels, believing there to be a lack of interest in the face of the multiple delays of their release dates. Writing for "The Escapist", Darren Mooney acknowledged that the film had not been broadly remembered in the pop cultural subconscious and had not found a fandom in the same sense as many other popular media, but argued that this was not a negative point, saying, "its defining legacy is the insistence that it lacks a legacy."


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: In 2022, in response to the trailer for "Avatar"'s and the film's re-release, journalists again questioned the cultural relevance of the film, particularly Patrick Ryan of "USA Today", who said the film had "curiously left almost no pop-culture footprint". In contrast, Bilge Ebiri of "Vulture" called others' opinions that the film had left no cultural impact "narrow-minded" and said that the film still held up well. A detailed overview of the "Avatar" franchise was reported in "The New York Times" in December of that year.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Two sequels to "Avatar" were confirmed after the success of the first film; this number was subsequently expanded to four. Their respective release dates were set as December 17, 2021, December 22, 2023, December 19, 2025, and December 17, 2027. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the four sequels' releases were delayed a year to December 16, 2022, December 20, 2024, December 18, 2026, and December 22, 2028. Cameron is directing, producing and co-writing all four; Josh Friedman, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, and Shane Salerno all took a part in the writing process of all of the sequels before being assigned to finish the separate scripts, making the eventual writing credits for each film unclear.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Filming for the first two sequels began in September 2017. Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Giovanni Ribisi, Joel David Moore, Dileep Rao, and CCH Pounder are all reprising their roles, as are Stephen Lang and Matt Gerald, despite the deaths of their characters in the first film. Sigourney Weaver is also returning, but as a new character, which was revealed to be Kiri, Jake and Neytiri's adoptive teenage daughter.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: New cast members include Cliff Curtis and Kate Winslet as members of the Na'vi reef people of Metkayina and Oona Chaplin as Varang, a "strong and vibrant central character who spans the entire saga of the sequels". Seven child actors will also portray pivotal new characters through the sequels: Jamie Flatters, Britain Dalton, and Trinity Bliss as Jake and Neytiri's children, Bailey Bass, Filip Geljo, and Duane Evans Jr. as free-divers of the Metkayina, and Jack Champion as a Javier "Spider" Socorro, a teenage human adopted by Jake and Neytiri. Although the first two sequels have been greenlit, Cameron stated in an interview on November 26, 2017, "Let's face it, if "Avatar 2" and "3" don't make enough money, there's not going to be a "4" and "5"".


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: On November 14, 2018, Cameron announced filming on "" and "Avatar 3" with the principal performance capture cast had been completed. In September 2020, Cameron confirmed that live action filming had been completed for "2" and was over 90% complete for "3".


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: "Toruk – The First Flight" is an original stage production by the Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil which ran between December 2015 and June 2019. Inspired by "Avatar", the story is set in Pandora's past, involving a prophecy concerning a threat to the Tree of Souls and a quest for totems from different tribes. Audience members could download an app in order to participate in show effects. On January 18, 2016, it was announced via the Toruk Facebook page that filming for a DVD release had been completed and was undergoing editing.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: In 2011, Cameron, Lightstorm, and Fox entered an exclusive licensing agreement with the Walt Disney Company to feature "Avatar"-themed attractions at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts worldwide, including a themed land for Disney's Animal Kingdom in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. The area, known as Pandora – The World of "Avatar", opened on May 27, 2017.


title: Avatar (2009 film)

text: Following the release of "Avatar", Cameron planned to write a novel based on the film, "telling the story of the movie, but [going] into much more depth about all the stories that we didn't have time to deal with." In 2013, this plan was superseded by the announcement of four novels set within the "Avatar expanded universe", to be written by Steven Gould. The books were due to be published by Penguin Random House, although since 2017, there has been no update on the planned book series.


title: Italy

text: Italy ( ), officially the Italian Republic ( ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, in Southern Europe; its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical region. Italy is also considered part of Western Europe. A unitary parliamentary republic with Rome as its capital and largest city, the country covers a total area of and shares land borders with France, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia and the enclaved microstates of Vatican City and San Marino. Italy has a territorial exclave in Switzerland, Campione. With over 60 million inhabitants, Italy is the third-most populous member state of the European Union.


title: Italy

text: Italy was the native place of civilizations such as the Italic peoples and the Etruscans, while due to its central geographic location in Southern Europe and the Mediterranean, the country has also historically been home to myriad peoples and cultures, who immigrated to the peninsula throughout history. The Latins formed the Roman Kingdom in the 8th century BC, which eventually became a republic with a government of the Senate and the People. The Roman Republic initially conquered and assimilated its neighbours on the Italian peninsula, eventually expanding and conquering parts of Europe, North Africa and Asia. By the first century BC, the Roman Empire emerged as the dominant power in the Mediterranean Basin and became a leading cultural, political and religious centre, inaugurating the Pax Romana, a period of more than 200 years during which Italy's law, technology, economy, art, and literature developed.


title: Italy

text: During the Early Middle Ages, Italy endured the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Barbarian Invasions, but by the 11th century, numerous city-states and maritime republics, mostly in the North, became prosperous through trade, commerce, and banking, laying the groundwork for modern capitalism. The Renaissance began in Italy and spread to the rest of Europe, bringing a renewed interest in humanism, science, exploration, and art. During the Middle Ages, Italian explorers discovered new routes to the Far East and the New World, helping to usher in the European Age of Discovery. Italy's commercial and political power significantly waned with the opening of trade routes that bypassed the Mediterranean. Centuries of rivalry and infighting between the Italian city-states, and the invasions of other European powers during the Italian Wars of the 15th and 16th centuries, left parts of Italy politically fragmented.


title: Italy

text: By the mid-19th century, rising Italian nationalism, along with other social, economic, and military events, led to a period of revolutionary political upheaval. After centuries of political and territorial divisions, Italy was almost entirely unified in 1861 following a war of independence, establishing the Kingdom of Italy. From the late 19th century to the early 20th century, Italy rapidly industrialised, mainly in the north, and acquired a colonial empire, while the south remained largely impoverished and excluded from industrialisation, fuelling a large and influential diaspora. Despite being one of the victorious allied powers in World War I, Italy entered a period of economic crisis and social turmoil, leading to the rise of the Italian fascist dictatorship in 1922. The participation of Fascist Italy in World War II on the Axis side ended in military defeat. Following the rise of the Italian Resistance and the subsequent Italian Civil War and liberation of Italy, the country abolished its monarchy, established a democratic Republic, enjoyed a prolonged economic boom, and became a highly developed country.


title: Italy

text: Italy has an advanced economy, being the tenth-largest nominal GDP (third in the European Union) in the world, the ninth-largest by national wealth and the third-largest by central bank gold reserve. It ranks highly in life expectancy, quality of life, healthcare, and education. The country is a great power, and it has a significant role in regional and global economic, military, cultural, and diplomatic affairs. Italy is a founding and leading member of the European Union and a member of numerous international institutions, including the United Nations, NATO, the OECD, the G7, the Latin Union, the Schengen Area, and many more. The source of many inventions and discoveries, the country is considered a Cultural Superpower and has long been a global centre of art, music, literature, philosophy, science and technology, tourism and fashion, as well as having greatly influenced and contributed to diverse fields including cinema, cuisine, sports, jurisprudence, banking, and business. It has the world's largest number of World Heritage Sites (58), and is the world's fifth-most visited country.


title: Italy

text: Hypotheses for the etymology of the name "Italia" are numerous. One is that it was borrowed via Ancient Greek from the Oscan "Víteliú" 'land of calves' ("cf." Lat "vitulus" "calf", Umb "vitlo" "calf"). Ancient Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus states this account together with the legend that Italy was named after Italus, mentioned also by Aristotle and Thucydides.


title: Italy

text: According to Antiochus of Syracuse, the term Italy was used by the ancient Greeks to initially refer only to the southern portion of the Bruttium peninsula corresponding to the modern province of Reggio and part of the provinces of Catanzaro and Vibo Valentia in southern Italy. Nevertheless, by his time the larger concept of Oenotria and "Italy" had become synonymous, and the name also applied to most of Lucania as well. According to Strabo's "Geographica", before the expansion of the Roman Republic, the name was used by ancient Greeks to indicate the land between the strait of Messina and the line connecting the gulf of Salerno and gulf of Taranto, corresponding roughly to the current region of Calabria. The ancient Greeks gradually came to apply the name "Italia" to a larger region In addition to the "Greek Italy" in the south, historians have suggested the existence of an "Etruscan Italy" covering variable areas of central Italy.


title: Italy

text: The borders of Roman Italy, "Italia", are better established. Cato's "Origines", the first work of history composed in Latin, described Italy as the entire peninsula south of the Alps. According to Cato and several Roman authors, the Alps formed the "walls of Italy". In 264 BC, Roman Italy extended from the Arno and Rubicon rivers of the centre-north to the entire south. The northern area of Cisalpine Gaul was occupied by Rome in the 220s BC and became considered geographically and "de facto" part of Italy, but remained politically and "de jure" separated. It was legally merged into the administrative unit of Italy in 42 BC by the triumvir Octavian as a ratification of Caesar's unpublished acts ("Acta Caesaris"). The islands of Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily and Malta were added to Italy by Diocletian in 292 AD, coinciding with the whole Italian geographical region. All its inhabitants were considered "Italic" and "Roman".


title: Italy

text: The Latin term "Italicus" was used to describe "a man of Italy" as opposed to a provincial. For example, Pliny the Elder notably wrote in a letter "Italicus es an provincialis"? meaning "are you an Italian or a provincial?".


title: Italy

text: The adjective "italianus", from which are derived the Italian (and also French and English) name of the Italians, is medieval and was used alternatively with Italicus during the early modern period.


title: Italy

text: After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, which was caused by the invasion of the Ostrogoths, the Kingdom of Italy was created. After the Lombard invasions, "Italia" was retained as the name for their kingdom, and for its successor kingdom within the Holy Roman Empire, which nominally lasted until 1806, although it had "de facto" disintegrated due to factional politics pitting the empire against the ascendant city republics in the 13th century.


title: Italy

text: Thousands of Lower Paleolithic artefacts have been recovered from Monte Poggiolo, dating as far back as 850,000 years.


title: Italy

text: Excavations throughout Italy revealed a Neanderthal presence dating back to the Middle Palaeolithic period some 200,000 years ago, while modern humans appeared about 40,000 years ago at Riparo Mochi. Archaeological sites from this period include Addaura cave, Altamura, Ceprano, and Gravina in Puglia.


title: Italy

text: The Ancient peoples of pre-Roman Italy – such as the Umbrians, the Latins (from which the Romans emerged), Volsci, Oscans, Samnites, Sabines, the Celts, the Ligures, the Veneti, the Iapygians, and many others – were Indo-European peoples, most of them specifically of the Italic group. The main historic peoples of possible non-Indo-European or pre-Indo-European heritage include the Etruscans of central and northern Italy, the Elymians and the Sicani in Sicily, and the prehistoric Sardinians, who gave birth to the Nuragic civilisation. Other ancient populations being of undetermined language families and of possible non-Indo-European origin include the Rhaetian people and Cammuni, known for their rock carvings in Valcamonica, the largest collections of prehistoric petroglyphs in the world. A well-preserved natural mummy known as Ötzi the Iceman, determined to be 5,000 years old (between 3400 and 3100 BCE, Copper Age), was discovered in the Similaun glacier of South Tyrol in 1991.


title: Italy

text: The first foreign colonisers were the Phoenicians, who initially established colonies and founded various emporiums on the coasts of Sicily and Sardinia. Some of these soon became small urban centres and were developed parallel to the ancient Greek colonies; among the main centres there were the cities of Motya, Zyz (modern Palermo), Soluntum in Sicily, and Nora, Sulci, and Tharros in Sardinia.


title: Italy

text: Between the 17th and the 11th centuries BC Mycenaean Greeks established contacts with Italy and in the 8th and 7th centuries BC a number of Greek colonies were established all along the coast of Sicily and the southern part of the Italian Peninsula, that became known as Magna Graecia.


title: Italy

text: Ionian settlers founded Elaia, Kyme, Rhegion, Naxos, Zankles, Hymera, and Katane. Doric colonists founded Taras, Syrakousai, Megara Hyblaia, Leontinoi, Akragas, Ghelas; the Syracusans founded Ankón and Adria; the megarese founded Selinunte. The Achaeans founded Sybaris, Poseidonia, Kroton, Lokroi Epizephyrioi, and Metapontum; tarantini and thuriots found Herakleia. The Greek colonization places the Italic peoples in contact with democratic forms of government and with high artistic and cultural expressions.


title: Italy

text: Rome, a settlement around a ford on the river Tiber in central Italy conventionally founded in 753 BC, was ruled for a period of 244 years by a monarchical system, initially with sovereigns of Latin and Sabine origin, later by Etruscan kings. The tradition handed down seven kings: Romulus, Numa Pompilius, Tullus Hostilius, Ancus Marcius, Tarquinius Priscus, Servius Tullius and Tarquinius Superbus. In 509 BC, the Romans expelled the last king from their city, favouring a government of the Senate and the People (SPQR) and establishing an oligarchic republic.


title: Italy

text: The Italian Peninsula, named Italia, was consolidated into a single entity during the Roman expansion and conquest of new lands at the expense of the other Italic tribes, Etruscans, Celts, and Greeks. A permanent association with most of the local tribes and cities was formed, and Rome began the conquest of Western Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East. In the wake of Julius Caesar's rise and death in the first century BC, Rome grew over the course of centuries into a massive empire stretching from Britain to the borders of Persia, and engulfing the whole Mediterranean basin, in which Greek and Roman and many other cultures merged into a unique civilisation. The long and triumphant reign of the first emperor, Augustus, began a golden age of peace and prosperity. Roman Italy remained the metropole of the empire, and as the homeland of the Romans and the territory of the capital, maintained a special status which made it ("ruler of the provinces", the latter being all the remaining territories outside Italy). More than two centuries of stability followed, during which Italy was referred to as the ("governor of the world") and ("parent of all lands").


title: Italy

text: The Roman Empire was among the most powerful economic, cultural, political and military forces in the world of its time, and it was one of the largest empires in world history. At its height under Trajan, it covered 5 million square kilometres. The Roman legacy has deeply influenced Western civilisation, shaping most of the modern world; among the many legacies of Roman dominance are the widespread use of the Romance languages derived from Latin, the numerical system, the modern Western alphabet and calendar, and the emergence of Christianity as a major world religion. The Indo-Roman trade relations, beginning around the 1st century BCE, testify to extensive Roman trade in far away regions; many reminders of the commercial trade between the Indian subcontinent and Italy have been found, such as the ivory statuette Pompeii Lakshmi from the ruins of Pompeii.


title: Italy

text: In a slow decline since the third century AD, the Empire split in two in 395 AD. The Western Empire, under the pressure of the barbarian invasions, eventually dissolved in 476 AD when its last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by the Germanic chief Odoacer. The Eastern half of the Empire survived for another thousand years.


title: Italy

text: After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Italy fell under the power of Odoacer's kingdom, and, later, was seized by the Ostrogoths, followed in the 6th century by a brief reconquest under Byzantine Emperor Justinian. The invasion of another Germanic tribe, the Lombards, late in the same century, reduced the Byzantine presence to the rump realm of the Exarchate of Ravenna and started the end of political unity of the peninsula for the next 1,300 years. The peninsula was therefore divided as follows: northern Italy and Tuscany formed the Lombard kingdom, with its capital in Pavia, while in central-southern Italy the Lombards controlled the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento. The remaining part of the peninsula remained under the Byzantines and was divided between the exarchate of Italy, based in Ravenna, the Duchy of Rome, the Duchy of Naples, the Duchy of Calabria and Sicily, the latter directly dependent on the Emperor of Constantinople. Invasions of the peninsula caused a chaotic succession of barbarian kingdoms and the so-called "dark ages". The Lombard kingdom was subsequently absorbed into the Frankish Empire by Charlemagne in the late 8th century and became the Kingdom of Italy. The Franks also helped the formation of the Papal States in central Italy. Until the 13th century, Italian politics was dominated by the relations between the Holy Roman Emperors and the Papacy, with most of the Italian city-states siding with the former (Ghibellines) or with the latter (Guelphs) for momentary convenience.


title: Italy

text: The Germanic Emperor and the Roman Pontiff became the universal powers of medieval Europe. However, the conflict over the investiture controversy (a conflict between two radically different views of whether secular authorities such as kings, counts, or dukes, had any legitimate role in appointments to ecclesiastical offices) and the clash between Guelphs and Ghibellines led to the end of the Imperial-feudal system in the north of Italy where city-states gained independence. It was during this chaotic era that Italian towns saw the rise of a peculiar institution, the medieval commune. Given the power vacuum caused by extreme territorial fragmentation and the struggle between the Empire and the Holy See, local communities sought autonomous ways to maintain law and order. The investiture controversy was finally resolved by the Concordat of Worms. In 1176 a league of city-states, the Lombard League, defeated the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa at the Battle of Legnano, thus ensuring effective independence for most of northern and central Italian cities.


title: Italy

text: Italian city-states such as Milan, Florence and Venice played a crucial innovative role in financial development, devising the main instruments and practices of banking and the emergence of new forms of social and economic organization. In coastal and southern areas, the maritime republics grew to eventually dominate the Mediterranean and monopolise trade routes to the Orient. They were independent thalassocratic city-states, though most of them originated from territories once belonging to the Byzantine Empire. All these cities during the time of their independence had similar systems of government in which the merchant class had considerable power. Although in practice these were oligarchical, and bore little resemblance to a modern democracy, the relative political freedom they afforded was conducive to academic and artistic advancement. The four best known maritime republics were Venice, Genoa, Pisa and Amalfi; the others were Ancona, Gaeta, Noli, and Ragusa. Each of the maritime republics had dominion over different overseas lands, including many Mediterranean islands (especially Sardinia and Corsica), lands on the Adriatic, Aegean, and Black Sea (Crimea), and commercial colonies in the Near East and in North Africa. Venice maintained enormous tracts of land in Greece, Cyprus, Istria, and Dalmatia until as late as the mid-17th century.


title: Italy

text: Venice and Genoa were Europe's main gateways to trade with the East, and producers of fine glass, while Florence was a capital of silk, wool, banking, and jewellery. The wealth such business brought to Italy meant that large public and private artistic projects could be commissioned. The republics were heavily involved in the Crusades, providing support and transport, but most especially taking advantage of the political and trading opportunities resulting from these wars. Italy first felt the huge economic changes in Europe which led to the commercial revolution: the Republic of Venice was able to defeat the Byzantine Empire and finance the voyages of Marco Polo to Asia; the first universities were formed in Italian cities, and scholars such as Thomas Aquinas obtained international fame; Frederick I of Sicily made Italy the political-cultural centre of a reign that temporarily included the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Jerusalem; capitalism and banking families emerged in Florence, where Dante and Giotto were active around 1300.


title: Italy

text: In the south, Sicily had become an Islamic emirate in the 9th century, thriving until the Italo-Normans conquered it in the late 11th century together with most of the Lombard and Byzantine principalities of southern Italy. Through a complex series of events, southern Italy developed as a unified kingdom, first under the House of Hohenstaufen, then under the Capetian House of Anjou and, from the 15th century, the House of Aragon. In Sardinia, the former Byzantine provinces became independent states known in Italian as Judicates, although some parts of the island fell under Genoese or Pisan rule until eventual Aragonese annexation in the 15th century. The Black Death pandemic of 1348 left its mark on Italy by killing perhaps one third of the population. However, the recovery from the plague led to a resurgence of cities, trade, and economy, which allowed the blossoming of Humanism and Renaissance that later spread to Europe.


title: Italy

text: Italy was the birthplace and heart of the Renaissance during the 1400s and 1500s. The Italian Renaissance marked the transition from the medieval period to the modern age as Europe recovered, economically and culturally, from the crises of the Late Middle Ages and entered the Early Modern Period. The Italian polities were now regional states effectively ruled by Princes, "de facto" monarchs in control of trade and administration, and their courts became major centres of the Arts and Sciences. The Italian princedoms represented a first form of modern states as opposed to feudal monarchies and multinational empires. The princedoms were led by political dynasties and merchant families such as the Medici in Florence, the Visconti and Sforza in the Duchy of Milan, the Doria in the Republic of Genoa, the Loredan, Mocenigo and Barbarigo in the Republic of Venice, the Este in Ferrara, and the Gonzaga in Mantua. The Renaissance was therefore a result of the wealth accumulated by Italian merchant cities combined with the patronage of its dominant families. Italian Renaissance exercised a dominant influence on subsequent European painting and sculpture for centuries afterwards, with artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael, Giotto, Donatello, and Titian, and architects such as Filippo Brunelleschi, Leon Battista Alberti, Andrea Palladio, and Donato Bramante.


title: Italy

text: Following the conclusion of the western schism in favour of Rome at the Council of Constance (1415–1417), the new Pope Martin V returned to the Papal States after a three years-long journey that touched many Italian cities and restored Italy as the sole centre of Western Christianity. During the course of this voyage, the Medici Bank was made the official credit institution of the Papacy, and several significant ties were established between the Church and the new political dynasties of the peninsula. The Popes' status as elective monarchs turned the conclaves and consistories of the Renaissance into political battles between the courts of Italy for primacy in the peninsula and access to the immense resources of the Catholic Church. In 1439, Pope Eugenius IV and the Byzantine Emperor John VIII Palaiologos signed a reconciliation agreement between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church at the Council of Florence hosted by Cosimo "the old" de Medici. In 1453, Italian forces under Giovanni Giustiniani were sent by Pope Nicholas V to defend the Walls of Constantinople but the decisive battle was lost to the more advanced Turkish army equipped with cannons, and Byzantium fell to Sultan Mehmed II.


title: Italy

text: The fall of Constantinople led to the migration of Greek scholars and texts to Italy, fueling the rediscovery of Greco-Roman Humanism. Humanist rulers such as Federico da Montefeltro and Pope Pius II worked to establish ideal cities where "man is the measure of all things", and therefore founded Urbino and Pienza respectively. Pico della Mirandola wrote the "Oration on the Dignity of Man", considered the manifesto of Renaissance Humanism, in which he stressed the importance of free will in human beings. The humanist historian Leonardo Bruni was the first to divide human history in three periods: Antiquity, Middle Ages and Modernity. The second consequence of the Fall of Constantinople was the beginning of the Age of Discovery.


title: Italy

text: Italian explorers and navigators from the dominant maritime republics, eager to find an alternative route to the Indies in order to bypass the Ottoman Empire, offered their services to monarchs of Atlantic countries and played a key role in ushering the Age of Discovery and the European colonization of the Americas. The most notable among them were: Christopher Columbus (), colonizer in the name of Spain, who is credited with discovering the New World and the opening of the Americas for conquest and settlement by Europeans; John Cabot (), sailing for England, who was the first European to set foot in "New Found Land" and explore parts of the North American continent in 1497; Amerigo Vespucci, sailing for Portugal, who first demonstrated in about 1501 that the New World (in particular Brazil) was not Asia as initially conjectured, but a fourth continent previously unknown to people of the Old World (America is named after him); and Giovanni da Verrazzano, at the service of France, renowned as the first European to explore the Atlantic coast of North America between Florida and New Brunswick in 1524.


title: Italy

text: Following the fall of Constantinople, the wars in Lombardy came to an end and a defensive alliance known as Italic League was formed between Venice, Naples, Florence, Milan, and the Papacy. Lorenzo "the Magnificent" de Medici was the greatest Florentine patron of the Renaissance and supporter of the Italic League. He notably avoided the collapse of the League in the aftermath of the Pazzi Conspiracy and during the aborted invasion of Italy by the Turks. However, the military campaign of Charles VIII of France in Italy caused the end of the Italic League and initiated the Italian Wars between the Valois and the Habsburgs. During the High Renaissance of the 1500s, Italy was therefore both the main European battleground and the cultural-economic centre of the continent. Popes such as Julius II (1503–1513) fought for the control of Italy against foreign monarchs, others such as Paul III (1534–1549) preferred to mediate between the European powers in order to secure peace in Italy. In the middle of this conflict, the Medici popes Leo X (1513–1521) and Clement VII (1523–1534) opposed the Protestant reformation and advanced the interests of their family. In 1559, at the end of the French invasions of Italy and of the Italian wars, the many states of northern Italy remained part of the Holy Roman Empire, indirectly subject to the Austrian Habsburgs, while all of Southern Italy (Naples, Sicily, Sardinia) and Milan were under Spanish Habsburg rule.


title: Italy

text: The Papacy remained a powerful force and launched the Counter-reformation. Key events of the period include: the Council of Trent (1545–1563); the excommunication of Elizabeth I (1570) and the Battle of Lepanto (1571), both occurring during the pontificate of Pius V; the construction of the Gregorian observatory, the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, and the Jesuit China mission of Matteo Ricci under Pope Gregory XIII; the French Wars of Religion; the Long Turkish War and the execution of Giordano Bruno in 1600, under Pope Clement VIII; the birth of the Lyncean Academy of the Papal States, of which the main figure was Galileo Galilei (later put on trial); the final phases of the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) during the pontificates of Urban VIII and Innocent X; and the formation of the last Holy League by Innocent XI during the Great Turkish War.


title: Italy

text: The Italian economy declined during the 1600s and 1700s, as the peninsula was excluded from the rising Atlantic slave trade. Following the European wars of succession of the 18th century, the south passed to a cadet branch of the Spanish Bourbons and the North fell under the influence of the Habsburg-Lorraine of Austria. During the Coalition Wars, northern-central Italy was reorganised by Napoleon in a number of Sister Republics of France and later as a Kingdom of Italy in personal union with the French Empire. The southern half of the peninsula was administered by Joachim Murat, Napoleon's brother-in-law, who was crowned as King of Naples. The 1814 Congress of Vienna restored the situation of the late 18th century, but the ideals of the French Revolution could not be eradicated, and soon re-surfaced during the political upheavals that characterised the first part of the 19th century.


title: Italy

text: During the Napoleonic era, in 1797, the first official adoption of the Italian tricolour as a national flag by a sovereign Italian state, the Cispadane Republic, a Napoleonic sister republic of Revolutionary France, took place, on the basis of the events following the French Revolution (1789–1799) which, among its ideals, advocated the national self-determination. This event is celebrated by the Tricolour Day. The Italian national colours appeared for the first time on a tricolour cockade in 1789, anticipating by seven years the first green, white and red Italian military war flag, which was adopted by the Lombard Legion in 1796.


title: Italy

text: The birth of the Kingdom of Italy was the result of efforts by Italian nationalists and monarchists loyal to the House of Savoy to establish a united kingdom encompassing the entire Italian Peninsula. Following the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the political and social Italian unification movement, or "Risorgimento", emerged to unite Italy consolidating the different states of the peninsula and liberate it from foreign control. A prominent radical figure was the patriotic journalist Giuseppe Mazzini, member of the secret revolutionary society "Carbonari" and founder of the influential political movement Young Italy in the early 1830s, who favoured a unitary republic and advocated a broad nationalist movement. His prolific output of propaganda helped the unification movement stay active.


title: Italy

text: In this context, in 1847, the first public performance of the song "Il Canto degli Italiani", the Italian national anthem since 1946, took place. "Il Canto degli Italiani", written by Goffredo Mameli set to music by Michele Novaro, is also known as the "Inno di Mameli", after the author of the lyrics, or "Fratelli d'Italia", from its opening line.


title: Italy

text: The most famous member of Young Italy was the revolutionary and general Giuseppe Garibaldi, renowned for his extremely loyal followers, who led the Italian republican drive for unification in Southern Italy. However, the Northern Italy monarchy of the House of Savoy in the Kingdom of Sardinia, whose government was led by Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, also had ambitions of establishing a united Italian state. In the context of the 1848 liberal revolutions that swept through Europe, an unsuccessful first war of independence was declared on Austria. In 1855, the Kingdom of Sardinia became an ally of Britain and France in the Crimean War, giving Cavour's diplomacy legitimacy in the eyes of the great powers. The Kingdom of Sardinia again attacked the Austrian Empire in the Second Italian War of Independence of 1859, with the aid of France, resulting in liberating Lombardy. On the basis of the Plombières Agreement, the Kingdom of Sardinia ceded Savoy and Nice to France, an event that caused the Niçard exodus, that was the emigration of a quarter of the Niçard Italians to Italy.