Avatar 2: What is the future for visual effects?

2009's Avatar was considered the pinnacle of his filmmaking prowess. It remains the highest-grossing film of all time thanks to a re-release in 2021 and 2022 to push its cumulative box-office total to $2.85 billion. Narratively, the story might best be described as a rehash of the 1992 Australian animated feature FernGully: The Last Rainforest; a white male saviour similarly teams up with the indigenous inhabitants of a lush ecosystem of flora and fauna to fight back against colonial industrialisation. But visually, critics and audiences across the globe lauded the innovative world-building of jungle-covered moon Pandora and the new VFX realms Cameron and WētāFX (the digital effects company founded by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson) took cinema goers to. "Avatar is a joyous celebration of story craft and the visual possibilities of cinema," Anne Thompson wrote in a review for IndieWire. "Cameron had set his sights on taking the technology of film where no one had gone before. And he delivers."