50 Fun Facts About Avatar (2009 Film)

Who wrote and directed the 2009 film Avatar?

He also co-produced it with Jon Landau, his producing partner from Titanic.

Who plays Jake Sully?

He was relatively unknown at the time and got the part after an angry outburst during secretive auditions impressed the director.

Which actress plays Neytiri?

Cast early, she helped screen-test the actors auditioning for Jake, including her eventual co-star.

What valuable mineral are the humans mining on Pandora?

The name is an old engineering in-joke for any material that would be perfect if only it existed.

Pandora is a moon in which star system?

It is the nearest star system to the Sun, which makes the 22nd-century mining trip at least plausible.

In what year is the film set?

By then Earth suffers from resource exhaustion and ecological collapse, which is why the RDA is digging on another world.

Who plays Colonel Miles Quaritch?

He had auditioned unsuccessfully for Aliens more than two decades earlier; Josh Brolin was approached first but declined the long shoot.

Which character does Sigourney Weaver play?

She is an exobiologist and head of the Avatar Program; a plant physiology professor advised on how such a scientist might study alien flora.

Jake is initiated into which Na'vi clan?

Their home sits on top of a rich unobtanium deposit, which is the whole problem.

Who is the clan's spiritual leader and Neytiri's mother?

She orders her daughter to teach Jake their ways, and later frees Jake and Grace after the clan takes them captive.

Wes Studi plays which clan chief, Neytiri's father?

He is killed when the RDA destroys the clan's home, and Tsu'tey becomes chief.

Jake regains the clan's trust by bonding with which feared flying creature?

The creature later gave its name to the Cirque du Soleil stage show set in Pandora's past.

What is the name of the Na'vi mother goddess?

Jake prays to her through the Tree of Souls before the battle, and Neytiri reads the animals joining the fight as her answer.

What is the giant tree where the clan lives called?

The director said its fiery destruction was meant to echo the September 11 attacks.

What was the film's official production budget?

Some estimates put the real cost at $280-310 million, plus around $150 million for promotion.

In which city did the film have its world premiere on December 10, 2009?

The venue was the Odeon Leicester Square; the US release followed on December 18.

How many Academy Award nominations did the film receive?

They included Best Picture and Best Director; it lost both to The Hurt Locker, directed by the director's ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow.

Which of these Oscars did the film win?

Its three wins were all craft awards: Art Direction, Cinematography and Visual Effects.

How many Saturn Awards did the film win at the 36th ceremony?

It won every category it was nominated in, including Best Science Fiction Film, Director, Writing and Special Effects.

Who composed the film's score?

It was his third collaboration with the director after Aliens and Titanic, and he called it the hardest score he had ever worked on.

Who sang the theme song "I See You"?

Its music video, directed by Jake Nava, premiered on MySpace three days before the US release.

Which USC linguist created the Na'vi language?

The director himself contributed about 30 of its roughly 1,000 words.

The Na'vi language's ejective consonants resemble those of which real language?

Amharic is the working language of Ethiopia; ejectives are made with a burst of air from the closed glottis.

Which New Zealand studio was the film's lead visual-effects company?

ILM was brought in alongside it for the battle sequences and devised a new way to make CGI explosions.

At its peak, how many people did the lead effects studio have working on the film?

They rendered it on a 10,000-square-foot server farm of 4,000 Hewlett-Packard machines.

What was the custom cloud and asset-management system Microsoft built for the film called?

It kept massive amounts of data in sync for crew members working remotely.

Which texturing and paint software was developed by The Foundry for the film?

It became a standard 3D painting tool across the industry after the film.

How much storage does each minute of the finished film occupy?

Building the Na'vi and Pandora took more than a petabyte, and single frames often took hours to render.

With whom did the director develop the Fusion 3D camera system used on the film?

The rig put two high-definition cameras in a single body to create depth perception.

Which actor's Bourne Ultimatum schedule kept him from playing Jake?

Chris Evans, Chris Pine, Chris Pratt and Channing Tatum were also considered for the role.

Which actor did 20th Century Fox push for the lead role?

He was focused on Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time instead.

In which city was the live-action footage shot?

Motion capture happened at the Hughes Aircraft stage in Playa Vista, Los Angeles; the live action was on the effects studio's soundstages.

To match his environmental views, the director made on-set catering entirely what?

He described the finished film as 60% computer-generated and 40% live action.

Production designers measured what kind of site to model the mining colony interiors?

They visited the Clyde Boudreaux platform in the Gulf of Mexico in June 2007 and rebuilt it in CGI.

The director said he learned the word "avatar" from which cyberpunk novel?

He also cited Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net; the remote-controlled bodies were influenced by Ghost in the Shell.

The idea of Pandora's "world mind" came from which novel?

Stanislaw Lem's book has a planet-sized ocean that seems to think; Princess Mononoke shaped Pandora's ecosystem.

How tall was the blue-skinned woman in the dream the director's mother described to him?

He used the image in an unproduced 1970s screenplay and returned to it for the Na'vi, who stand about 10 feet tall.

How much did Fox front for the proof-of-concept clip shown to executives in 2005?

The executives liked it but still wanted a shorter script and smaller budget, and the studio declined outright in mid-2006.

After Fox passed, the director pitched the film to which studio before Fox reclaimed it?

He showed the clip to Bob Iger; Fox then exercised its right of first refusal in October 2006.

On its first day online, how many times was the first trailer viewed?

That was a record at the time; the trailer dropped on August 21, 2009, dubbed "Avatar Day".

Which drink's specially marked cans unlocked augmented-reality features on AVTR.com?

Holding a can up to a webcam triggered the site's 3D features; McDonald's ran an "Avatarize yourself" promotion in Europe.

Which studio developed Avatar: The Game?

Some of the game studio's vehicle and creature designs ended up in the film itself.

Which film did Avatar surpass to become the highest-grossing of all time in January 2010?

Both were the same director's films; it also became the first movie to gross $2 billion worldwide.

A 2021 re-release in which country let Avatar retake the top spot from Avengers: Endgame?

The floating Hallelujah Mountains were themselves inspired by karst formations in Guilin, Huangshan and Zhangjiajie.

Which film overtook Avatar as the best-selling US Blu-ray in January 2015?

Avatar had sold 1.5 million Blu-rays on day one, shattering The Dark Knight's record of 600,000.

How long is the original theatrical cut?

The Special Edition runs 170 minutes and the collector's extended cut 178; the extra nine minutes cost over $9 million.

Which company staged the film's theatrical adaptation, Toruk – The First Flight?

It ran from December 2015 to June 2019 and let audience members join in the effects through a mobile app.

Pandora – The World of Avatar opened in 2017 at which theme park?

The licensing deal with Disney was signed in 2011, years before Disney bought Fox.

Which fantasy artist sued over claims that Pandora copied his paintings?

He sought $50 million over 14 images of dragons and floating rocks; the case was dismissed in 2014.

Watching Avatar convinced which director he could finally adapt Valérian and Laureline?

The result was Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets in 2017.