You know how you can tell that people are excited about the movies again? Because trailers are leaking left and right lately. Earlier this month, a trailer for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey leaked online and went viral. Now, the trailer for the third Avatar movie, Fire and Ash, is out there to watch. We're not going to embed it on this page — I don't want to get sued — but it's available to watch here as of this writing.
We can describe the trailer a bit, though. Obviously, it looks spectacular; the Avatar movies have also prided themselves on being on the cutting edge of visual effects technology and this new film will continue that tradition. We're back on the moon of Pandora, where the native Na'vi aliens are fighting invading humans here for their resources. We also see a lot of the Ash People, a new group of Na'vi who will be antagonistic.
We get glimpses of the characters. It looks like Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) is struggling after the death of her won at the ene of Avatar: The Way of Water. "You cannot live like this, baby," her husband Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) tells her, "in hate." It's a little weird to hear a 10-foot-tall blue alien call someone else "baby," but what are you gonna do?
We see a fair amount of Spider (Jack Champion), the human who was raised alongside Jake and Neytiri's other Na'vi children. And in one shot, it looks like Jake has been captured by the human military, or maybe he turns himself in.
We'll find out the details when Avatar: Fire and Ash drops in theaters on December 19. And you'll be able to see the trailer legitimately soon enough.
The Odyssey tickets already being scalped a year before release
Let's circle back to The Odyssey for a moment. This adpatation of Homer's epic poem isn't out until July 17 of next year, but Universal started selling advance tickets to IMAX 70mm screenings — the biggest, most impressive screens on which it is possible to watch a movie; there are only a few dozen such in the United States — this week. Per The A.V. Club, they sold out in minutes, and at one point there were tickets selling on eBay for as much as $300 (although that link is now dead).
Christopher Nolan is one of the few directors working today whose movies can drum up this kind of excitement. During the run of his movie Oppenheimer in 2023, tickets to see it in 70mm on IMAX were selling for over $100 on Craigslist. But this is the first time that tickets are being marked up and resold this far ahead of a movie's release. The closest comparison is probably what happens with major concerts like Taylor Swift's Eras tour.
As sucky as this kind of opportunism is, there is a part of me that's happy people are so excited about movies, which have sometimes seemed in danger of dying off over the past few years. Nolan in particular has gotten good at turning his movies into events; who else could have made a movie about a nuclear scientist that grossed a billion dollars? I don't like the scalping, but I do like the enthusiasm.
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