Update: I apologize, I haven't been online much due to the holidays. I realized that there was an erroneous data point for Andrew Stanton in 2009 that was never supposed to be there. I missed it when I initially looked over the graph, but it's been removed now.

As we've been reflecting on the last ten years, we've been asking ourselves whether any true "masters" of science fiction and urban fantasy have emerged, especially in film and television. It's certainly been a decade of highs and lows, of old masters who've begun to fade and bright new stars just cresting the horizon.

To that end, I've attempted to chart the relative "master levels" of various directors and television producers over the several years. This is an utterly unscientific chart; I looked at the projects these folks have had since 2000 and assigned each one a "master level." The number reflects my understanding of the projects acclaim, its ability to attract an audience (i.e. box office/Nielsen numbers), its awards, whether it succeeded in something unusual (such as a relatively popular foreign language film in the case of Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth or Dr. Horrible's status as a breakthrough web film), and the nebulous sense that it add or subtracted from the individual's "geek cred." The numbers themselves are largely subjective and, of course, you should feel free to nitpick.

The greater purpose was to offer a watercolory sense of whether any "masters" have emerged from this crowd. Certainly, the last year has brought low some of the genres' promising potentials. Joss Whedon entered into the decade riding high on a Buffy/Angel cocktail. Though his name wasn't enough to overcome Fox's confusing treatment of Firefly, but the show's eventual cult popularity led to the Serenity feature film, and the Whedon brand helped make Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog an important moment for web-based content. Perhaps this all made Dollhouse — which has been, by turns, frustrating and brilliant — all the more disappointing, its impeding demise fairly readily accepted, even by Whedon's fanbase. Similarly, Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica, despite being regarded by some readers as the most overrated scifi of the decade, was regarded by many as a turning point for smart, politically savvy space opera. But a rocky final season punctuated by finale filled with dei ex machinae left a lot of folks sour on the entire series. And the Wachowskis, while doing a solid (though Alan Moore-enraging) bit of cinema with V for Vendetta, never quite lived up to the promises of The Matrix.

But there have been plenty of masterful bright spots as well. Bryan Fuller gave us some beautiful urban fantasy with shows with Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, and Pushing Daisies, even if many of his efforts (including the truly amazing The Amazing Screw-On Head) were prematurely axed, or shafted before ever getting off the ground. Guillermo del Toro brought us to great heights with Pan's Labyrinth, even if his other eye candy films didn't hit the same heights.

So have we seen any masters? Peter Jackson has certainly come close. Granted, The Lord of the Rings movies are high fantasy, but they showcased Jackson's ability to handle a difficult epic in a way that not only pleased JRR Tolkien's fans, but also won him mainstream accolades. And his remake of King Kong, which should have been automatically anathema, proved both profitable and well-reviewed. The Lovely Bones has been his blip, earning him his worst reviews in 20 years. But it's more likely that 2009 will be remembered as the year Jackson introduced the world to filmmaker Neill Blomkamp, demonstrating that he has a good eye for new talent and the Hollywood cache to bring that talent to light. It's not for nothing that he made this year's power list.

Another power list member, JJ Abrams, has also given us a good spate of fun and thoughtful science fiction. While he didn't give us the decade's best monster movie, he did manage to reboot the Star Trek franchise in a way that was respectful to what came before and drew in folks who never turned into the TV shows. Of course, we still have yet to see as Lost will end and whether Fringe will survive.

Chris Nolan is on the list of promising possibilities for eventual masterhood. Although Memento wasn't science fiction, it took a "what if" concept (here, what if a man searching for his wife's killer had no short term memory) and portrayed it in a thoughtful, suspenseful, and ultimately heartbreaking way. And he not only shot fresh blood into the corpse of the Batman franchise, he made it Oscar-worthy. And now he's continuing the science fiction thread with Inception.

And, of course, there's the question of whether James Cameron will prove the kind of science fiction as much as he claimed to be the king of the world. His foray into science fiction television, Dark Angel, never fared particularly well in the ratings; it was eventually canceled in favor of Firefly, and it never achieved the posthumous popularity of the later show. But perhaps Avatar is the reinforcement of his previous scifi successes, proof that he can still be relevant where other long-time directors have started to fade away. Hopefully, we won't have to wait another 12 years to see his next installment.

Personally, though, after seeing the delightful Monsters Inc. followed by the superb The Incredibles and WALL-E, I have my fingers crossed for Andrew Stanton and Pixar Studios. Here's hoping that John Carter of Mars is something phenomenal.

Still, singling out directors and producers as possible masters might be missing the point entirely, even when we're talking about movies and TV. Alan Moore might well be your science fiction master, not just because he has written so many fantastic books, but also because those books have captured the imagination of so many directors in the last several years — albeit with varying results. And in the coming years we'll see how comic book writer Brian K. Vaughan — who has been working on Lost as well as the Buffy Season Eight comics — translates to the big screen when Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina, and Runaways hit theaters.

So who, if anyone, do you see as your science fiction master? Someone from the list above? Perhaps Russell T. Davis for reviving and expanding Doctor Who? Or maybe writers like Jane Espenson, who have worked on so many of the shows we love? And, with filmmakers like Neill Blomkamp and Duncan Jones arriving on the scene, who might prove themselves master of the genre in the next ten years?

Graph by Steph Fox.

Here's a bonus chart, with more data:

Here are some of the weirdest Cameron facts, from The Futurist by Rebecca Keegan, as well as Keegan's interviews about the book. We've also linked to some excerpts from the book that you can read online.

When Cameron was a young kid, his mom Shirley joined the Canadian Women's Army Corps and spent her weekends in fatigues and combat boots, learning to assemble a rifle while blindfolded. She's perplexed by the idea that she might be the inspiration for Cameron's female heroines. Cameron was a precocious kid who was speaking complete sentences at 18 months and reading science books when the other kids were reading See Spot Run. He won every academic award in ninth grade and became president of the Science Club, and not surprisingly got himself beat up by all the other kids in the process. He learned to do just well enough in school to get good grades, without getting any awards.

And he's an atheist, who decided agnosticism was "cowardly atheism." When the other kids read the Lord's Prayer in school, Cameron decided it was a "tribal chant" and decided not to do it.

If graphic novels had existed as an art form when Cameron started out, he might have done that instead of trying to direct movies.

As a teenager, Cameron worked six-hour shifts as a precision tool and die machinist while taking 14 units at Fullerton College. In his early 20s, he worked as a truck driver, janitor and gas-station attendant. And his girlfriend at the time worked at Bob's Big Boy Diner, just like Sarah Connor.

"You can't help but come away from spending time with Jim feeling that you're a little bit stupid," Peter Jackson warned Keegan. "He's got such a sharp mind."

His early writings included a post-nuclear science-fiction story called "Necropolis." His first real film project, made with friends, was a never-completed epic called Xenogenesis, for which they shot a complex sequence involving a guy being chased by a tank firing laser beams, causing explosions at his feet. This got him in the front door at Roger Corman studios.

After Cameron got promoted to director of Piranha II when the original director quit, he broke into the editing bay to create his own edit of the film against the producer's wishes. When Cameron first met Arnold Schwarzenegger, he didn't want to cast him in The Terminator — he figured Arnie would have the usual body-builder movie arc: make some movies wearing a toga, and then fall off the face of the Earth. (The two are now friends, and race motorcycles together on weekends.)

He only did Aliens because he called an agent's bluff. And during the making of that film, he had to deal with a British film crew who saw the 31-year-old director as a young upstart who hadn't earned his stripes by working his way up. The assistant director, Derek Cracknell, felt better able to direct the film than Cameron and would try to set up shots differently than Cameron wanted. The crew was used to two tea breaks, lunch at the pub, and work ending by 5 PM, and Cameron drove them to work longer hours, sparking a full-on walk-out. Finally, Cameron talked to the crew in a marathon gripe session, which ended with promises of more cooperation. Somehow, Cameron finished making the film, and then addressed the crew one last time:

This has been a long and difficult shoot, fraught by many problems. But the one thing that kept me going, through it all, was the certain knowledge that one day I would drive out the gate of Pinewood and never come back, and that you sorry bastards would still be here.

(You can read an excerpt from the book, detailing this incident, over at Slashfilm.)

After Terminator II came out, Guillermo Del Toro was staying at Cameron's guest house for long stretches of time. And after Del Toro's father got kidnapped in Mexico, Cameron helped Del Toro find the right hostage negotiators to get him out, and helped put up the money for his ransom.

Cameron stood up to Arnold Schwarzenegger, who did not want Jamie Lee Curtis to be his costar in True Lies, and won. And when Schwarzenegger and Tom Arnold took off on a tour of DC monuments, leaving the set, they returned to find Cameron standing in the middle of the road, arms crossed, like a Terminator ready to total their vehicle. Cameron lunged in the passenger door and got in Arnie's face, shouting "Do you want Paul Verhoeven to direct the rest of this [expletive]? You do that [expletive] again and that's what's gonna happen."

During the making of Titanic, the whole crew ate chowder laced with LSD, and freaked out so badly, an assistant director stabbed Cameron in the face with a pencil. He almost died during the making of that film, when his sub got trapped on the ocean floor by currents that thwarted every attempt to rise — and a similar predicament happened during the making of The Abyss, when he ran out of oxygen. (His underwater cinematographer was nearly deaf due to a diving-bell accident, and didn't hear Cameron saying he was out of oxygen, and then he had to punch out his own safety diver to reach the surface — the safety diver was trying to hold Cameron 15 feet below the surface, as he was trained to do, but Cameron had a faulty regulator that was just spewing water. Read an excerpt about the making of The Abyss at TechLand.)

Cameron addressed a 2000 Earth Day celebration by intoning, "I just want to say that we're all doomed," mocking his own penchant for apocalyptic scenarios. "But on the positive side, we created this impending doom ourselves, with our brains, with our technology, and we can damn well uncreate it."

When Cameron brought his 153-page screenplay for Avatar to Fox, the executives "acted like it was a complete shambles," Cameron tells Keegan. That's because Cameron was in the habit of changing all his dialogue around after watching the actors rehearse, and it had been so long between projects that the suits had forgotten that's how Cameron works. So Cameron had to revise the movie and take it back to Fox — and then the studio still decided to pass on it officially. But after Cameron took the film to Disney, Fox changed its mind in a hurry.

Cameron told MTV that he knows what happens after his current movie-that'll-change-movies-forever:

We'll follow Jake and Neytiri [in the next movies.] I have a trilogy-scaled arc of story right now, but I haven't really put any serious work into writing a script.

This being James Cameron, of course, he'd much rather talk about the technology than the story:

From the time we capture and finish the capture, it's literally nine to 10 months to get the CG characters working, to get their facial musculature working. So now we have Jake, we have Neytiri. Sam can step right back into it, the characters will fit them like a glove, and we'll just go on. So a lot of the start-up torque that had to be done for one movie really makes more sense if you play it out across several films. My next goal is to refine the technique, make it easier so it doesn't take as long. We were doing a lot of pioneering work on 'Avatar.' It wouldn't have taken as long if we already knew exactly how to do it.

Has Cameron finally found the vehicle to live out all of his George Lucas fantasies? And if so, should we expect disappointing prequels 20 years from now? Start preparing for disappointing early, friends.

James Cameron Planning 'Avatar' Trilogy, Director Tells MTV News [MTV Movies]

Oh, and there are some spoilers for Avatar, as well as past Cameron films, in here.

Wrong Side of The Tracks Love

She's an alien and he's a paralyzed human. She's ten times his size, and he just wants to break all the rules. It's the tried-and-true odd-couple pairing that James Cameron took to its stereotypical heights in Titanic. It will never work out between these two and everyone is against them, but that's exactly while we'll root for them. It's cheesy, but it works. And it's all over Avatar.

Power Loader

The mecha power suit sure looks familiar. Maybe that's because you saw the first inklings of this idea in Cameron's mind during Aliens — sure, it's a much more stripped-down version, but if you look at the picture above you can see subtle resemblances between the two. I'd like to think that Cameron was clever enough to incorporate the yellow and black hazard tape on both as a subtle wink to his past, but then again who knows. Still in a film like this, there are very few things that sneak by Cameron unnoticed.

Breathing Masks

For The Abyss, Cameron has these masks made specially, so the audience could see the expression on the divers' faces underwater. It would make sense that he would incorporate the same decision with the Pandora breathing masks. Even if human skin could be exposed on Pandora, a half face mask would block just about all expressions. Plus, it's better than the Battlefield Earth nose plugs, that's for sure.

Save Her From Her Destiny

Boy does Cameron love a woman with a planned-out life. Sarah Connor's destiny is all planned out, Rose is to be married for money, and likewise, Neytiri's life plans are laid out in front of her. Why do Cameron's women always seem to have their lives planned out for them, for better or worse? Even Ripley — her destiny is forever entangled with that of the alien species, and by the time they bring her back as a half-alien and half-human, she's strangely accepted this fate.

The Samson Versus Hunter Killer

James Cameron did design spaceship models in his past. But it's pretty interesting to see how the Samson helicopters in Avatar are basically an upgraded version of the Hunter Killer from Terminator.

Military BAD! Scientists Good!

If you're in the military and not a defected member with a new lease on life, you are an evil killing machine with no respect for life, love, nature and especially aliens. In fact, you HATE aliens. KILL THEM ALL. If you are an everyday joe, driller or scientist who delights in wearing scrubby old clothes and band t-shirts, you are the hero of the story — congrats.

Whether Avatar is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it's undeniable that the film - like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year - is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it's a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people. Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?

Avatar imaginatively revisits the crime scene of white America's foundational act of genocide, in which entire native tribes and civilizations were wiped out by European immigrants to the American continent. In the film, a group of soldiers and scientists have set up shop on the verdant moon Pandora, whose landscapes look like a cross between Northern California's redwood cathedrals and Brazil's tropical rainforest. The moon's inhabitants, the Na'vi, are blue, catlike versions of native people: They wear feathers in their hair, worship nature gods, paint their faces for war, use bows and arrows, and live in tribes. Watching the movie, there is really no mistake that these are alien versions of stereotypical native peoples that we've seen in Hollywood movies for decades.

And Pandora is clearly supposed to be the rich, beautiful land America could still be if white people hadn't paved it over with concrete and strip malls. In Avatar, our white hero Jake Sully (sully - get it?) explains that Earth is basically a war-torn wasteland with no greenery or natural resources left. The humans started to colonize Pandora in order to mine a mineral called unobtainium that can serve as a mega-energy source. But a few of these humans don't want to crush the natives with tanks and bombs, so they wire their brains into the bodies of Na'vi avatars and try to win the natives' trust. Jake is one of the team of avatar pilots, and he discovers to his surprise that he loves his life as a Na'vi warrior far more than he ever did his life as a human marine.

Jake is so enchanted that he gives up on carrying out his mission, which is to persuade the Na'vi to relocate from their "home tree," where the humans want to mine the unobtanium. Instead, he focuses on becoming a great warrior who rides giant birds and falls in love with the chief's daughter. When the inevitable happens and the marines arrive to burn down the Na'vi's home tree, Jake switches sides. With the help of a few human renegades, he maintains a link with his avatar body in order to lead the Na'vi against the human invaders. Not only has he been assimilated into the native people's culture, but he has become their leader.

This is a classic scenario you've seen in non-scifi epics from Dances With Wolves to The Last Samurai, where a white guy manages to get himself accepted into a closed society of people of color and eventually becomes its most awesome member. But it's also, as I indicated earlier, very similar in some ways to District 9. In that film, our (anti)hero Wikus is trying to relocate a shantytown of aliens to a region far outside Johannesburg. When he's accidentally squirted with fluid from an alien technology, he begins turning into one of the aliens against his will. Deformed and cast out of human society, Wikus reluctantly helps one of the aliens to launch their stalled ship and seek help from their home planet.

If we think of Avatar and its ilk as white fantasies about race, what kinds of patterns do we see emerging in these fantasies?

In both Avatar and District 9, humans are the cause of alien oppression and distress. Then, a white man who was one of the oppressors switches sides at the last minute, assimilating into the alien culture and becoming its savior. This is also the basic story of Dune, where a member of the white royalty flees his posh palace on the planet Dune to become leader of the worm-riding native Fremen (the worm-riding rite of passage has an analog in Avatar, where Jake proves his manhood by riding a giant bird). An interesting tweak on this story can be seen in 1980s flick Enemy Mine, where a white man (Dennis Quaid) and the alien he's been battling (Louis Gossett Jr.) are stranded on a hostile planet together for years. Eventually they become best friends, and when the alien dies, the human raises the alien's child as his own. When humans arrive on the planet and try to enslave the alien child, he lays down his life to rescue it. His loyalties to an alien have become stronger than to his own species.

These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color - their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the "alien" cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become "race traitors," and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It's not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it's not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It's a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.

Think of it this way. Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege. Jake never really knows what it's like to be a Na'vi because he always has the option to switch back into human mode. Interestingly, Wikus in District 9 learns a very different lesson. He's becoming alien and he can't go back. He has no other choice but to live in the slums and eat catfood. And guess what? He really hates it. He helps his alien buddy to escape Earth solely because he's hoping the guy will come back in a few years with a "cure" for his alienness. When whites fantasize about becoming other races, it's only fun if they can blithely ignore the fundamental experience of being an oppressed racial group. Which is that you are oppressed, and nobody will let you be a leader of anything.

This is not a message anybody wants to hear, least of all the white people who are creating and consuming these fantasies. Afro-Canadian scifi writer Nalo Hopkinson recently told the Boston Globe:

In the US, to talk about race is to be seen as racist. You become the problem because you bring up the problem. So you find people who are hesitant to talk about it.

She adds that the main mythic story you find in science fiction, generally written by whites, "is going to a foreign culture and colonizing it."

Sure, Avatar goes a little bit beyond the basic colonizing story. We are told in no uncertain terms that it's wrong to colonize the lands of native people. Our hero chooses to join the Na'vi rather than abide the racist culture of his own people. But it is nevertheless a story that revisits the same old tropes of colonization. Whites still get to be leaders of the natives - just in a kinder, gentler way than they would have in an old Flash Gordon flick or in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars novels.

When will whites stop making these movies and start thinking about race in a new way?

First, we'll need to stop thinking that white people are the most "relatable" characters in stories. As one blogger put it:

By the end of the film you're left wondering why the film needed the Jake Sully character at all. The film could have done just as well by focusing on an actual Na'vi native who comes into contact with crazy humans who have no respect for the environment. I can just see the explanation: "Well, we need someone (an avatar) for the audience to connect with. A normal guy will work better than these tall blue people." However, this is the type of thinking that molds all leads as white male characters (blank slates for the audience to project themselves upon) unless your name is Will Smith.

But more than that, whites need to rethink their fantasies about race.

Whites need to stop remaking the white guilt story, which is a sneaky way of turning every story about people of color into a story about being white. Speaking as a white person, I don't need to hear more about my own racial experience. I'd like to watch some movies about people of color (ahem, aliens), from the perspective of that group, without injecting a random white (erm, human) character to explain everything to me. Science fiction is exciting because it promises to show the world and the universe from perspectives radically unlike what we've seen before. But until white people stop making movies like Avatar, I fear that I'm doomed to see the same old story again and again.

Dune image via leywad.

As Cameron does press for Avatar, he's been asked again and again what he thought of Terminator Salvation, which he apparently watched on his hotel-room TV late at night, over three consecutive nights. The first few times, Cameron was pretty nice, telling MTV back on Dec. 9:

It's better than I thought it was going to be... It's actually quite reverential to the mythos of the 'Terminator' world," he said. "I think McG and the writers tried hard to keep reacquainting you with some of those ideas in the story that they were weaving. So actually I thought it was pretty cool. I did feel that it sort of lacked Je ne sais quoi. Although I love Sam [Worthington] in it.

But today, talking to the Toronto Sun, he was a bit more damning:

I've moved on creatively from The Terminator, so I'm not really interested in that imagery and even those ideas anymore - and I'm not sure the world is that interested either. It's run its course, I feel... [Arnold Schwarzenegger's] persona was part of The Terminator and when you uncouple those, you get Terminator Salvation, which is actually a fine film from a pure filmmaking standpoint - it just doesn't gel up into anything mind-blowing... I wish I hadn't sold the rights for one dollar.

Apparently Cameron sold the movie rights for a dollar in exchange for the right to direct the first movie. He adds:

If I had a little time machine and I could only send back something the length of a tweet, it'd be - ‘Don't sell.'

I sort of like the idea that James Cameron sits around fantasizing about twittering backwards in time.

The article looks at a few of the key scientific aspects of Avatar and fact-checks them for plausibility, explaining the innovations we would need to make them a reality. The challenges of easy interstellar travel apply to tons of movies, but there is also a fascinating discussion on the possibility of habitable worlds in the Alpha Centauri system, where Pandora is supposedly located.

The least plausible scientific advance? The very Avatar technology that is central to the movie's plot. Although neuroscientists are working on brain-machine interfaces have allowed humans and other primates to control the movements of machines, Miguel Nicolelis, the Duke University neuroscientist Popular Mechanics consulted, notes that the transfer of one's consciousness into a biological body is several orders of magnitude beyond what is currently feasible.

But Hollywood can help inspire technological innovation, and the article identifies the RDA's AMP exosuit as an idea that's not yet feasible, but gets inventors' gears turning:

"Movies like Avatar are good to get us thinking about the possibilities," says David Audet, leader of the Soldier Mobility and Mission Enhancement Team at the Natick Soldier Research Development and Engineering Center in Massachusetts that has a point role in developing XOS. And while there is "a lot of Hollywood going on" with the AMP suit, it suggests the immense logistical work that such devices could render and serves as, Audet says, "an example of a foundational platform that with very little modifications can perform a large suite of attacks."

The Science Behind James Cameron's Avatar [Popular Mechanics]

And here's your spoiler warning. Spoilers ahead!

So in Avatar, Jake Sully is a marine who's suffered a spinal injury (someone "blew a hole in my life," as he puts it) and his life is going nowhere. Until he gets a chance to go to the far-off Pandora and take his dead brother's place, piloting a genetically engineered "avatar." Built out of alien DNA, the avatar allows Sully to walk among the Na'Vi, the giant blue natives of Pandora, and look like one of them. Because Sully is a warrior, like the Na'Vi tribespeople, he finds acceptance in their ranks — even as he knows his fellow humans are preparing to relocate the Na'Vi by force, to get at a rich supply of a rare substance called Unobtanium.

As Jake learns to use his new alien body, leaping from treetops and clifftops, romancing the chief's sexy daughter (Zoe Saldana) and bonding with a flying dragon for life, you'll discover your new favorite escapist fantasy. Jake falls in love with the excitement and the nobility and yes, the biodiversity, of Pandora, and you're right there with him. Avatar's journey really does feel magical and transformative, for Jake and for the audience.

It's hard to imagine a movie where medium and story are so closely married. Even as Jake Sully climbs into a coffin and abandons his human body for a spry alien one, Cameron is hoping to pull you into his alien world to a much greater degree than the usual movie immersion. Cameron has spent untold millions of Fox's dollars to make you forget you're really in a movie theater, instead of on an alien planet. The whole exercise is a metaphor for the experience of watching any movie, with Cameron's camera lens represented by the beds that transfer people's minds into alien bodies.

And the film's 3-D, CG and motion-capture really are all they're cracked up to be. The scenes which look trifling on your little computer window become etched on your mind's eye, when you see them on the big screen in 3-D. The transition from live-action to animation feels like a costume change, and when live-action people are on the screen with CG characters, it's miles away from Roger Rabbit, or even from Andy Serkis' Gollum.

Cameron is clearly saying: Look what technology can do. It can tight-beam your consciousness into a totally foreign time and place. And just maybe, like Jake Sully, you'll find yourself going native.

There's only one problem with this notion, and it nearly wrecks an otherwise nearly perfect movie: The further we venture into Pandora's heart, the more unconvincing it is. At first, the forest moon is heart-breakingly beautiful and well-realized, and every weird creature on the planet stands out in its own way. When Jake gets chased by big dinosaur-like monsters, it's tons more thrilling than your standard Roland Emmerich/Michael Bay CG spectacle. But once Jake gets himself embedded among the alien Na'Vi people, the illusion starts to fall apart.

This is partly because once you're surrounded by Pandora's fantasy-land, it starts to get just a bit too pretty, and certainly too rich. About the time hundreds of glowing tree-spirits land on Jake's blue avatar body, the animation starts to feel a bit... cartoony.

But more than that, we never really see the Na'Vi as a convincing society — instead we see a ludicrous "noble savage" stereotype, that only gets cruder and more ridiculous the deeper into it we go. When Jake is only interacting with Saldana's character, Neytiri, their interaction feels natural enough. But once you're in the middle of a Na'Vi crowd scene, you have a harder time believing in these people. And that, in turn, may pull you right out of the movie.

Cameron has clearly thought endlessly about every aspect of this movie's worldbuilding, but it never seems to have occurred to him that populating his planet with Pocohontas/Tarzan ooga-booga people would be a mistake. The Na'Vi are animalistic and in tune with nature, and they're good-hearted in direct proportion to their simplicity. They worship a mystical world-mind and its messengers, magic happy tree spirits that connect them to their ancestors — through their magical native-people hair. (Their tree/ancestor religion turns out to have a scientific basis, to be fair.)

By the time the Na'Vi's matriarch is leading the whole tribe in a hippie ritual, with lots of swaying in front of the sacred tree, you'll be rolling your eyes so much, it may interfere with the 3-D stereoscopy.

(When I mentioned the term "forest moon" a little while ago, it may have created an association in your mind. That association was not entirely unintentional.)

In a way, Cameron's strengths work against him a little bit here. The humans' world feels completely lived-in. Pandora's soldiers could have stepped right out of the first reel of Aliens. Cameron is in love with all of the toys, from the Huey-helicopter-inspired flying machines to the "avatar" chambers. His human characters are mostly well-worn archetypes, from the weaselly evil corporate guy (Giovanni Ribisi, channeling Aliens' Paul Reiser) to Stephen Lang's brutal Col. Quaritch (bringing the George C. Scott) to Sigourney Weaver's tough scientist with a heart of gold. The human world isn't as original as Pandora, but it feels a lot more fully inhabited. The contrast doesn't do the dragon-riding, hissing, deeply spiritual tree people any favors.

It's likely that if the Na'Vi felt as real as the human society — if you could feel the dirt under your fingernails after a day's bow-hunting and chafe under the patriarchal tribal leadership — then the escapism of running off to join the clan might not seem as alluring. In his earlier movies, Cameron never had to try and make us fall in love with Skynet, or the Alien queen. So it's not surprising that he stumbles when he tries to create an "other" that's lovable rather than scary.

The movie's other big problem is somewhat related: It gets preachy about environmentalism, to an extent that may grate on your nerves. Early on, when Jake is learning about the nature-loving ways of the Na'Vi, he grumbles that he hopes this "tree-hugger crap" won't be on the final exam. And it totally is.

But like I said, Avatar is otherwise a nearly perfect movie. (It's up to you whether stereotypical native peoples or eco-lectures are a deal-breaker.) As an action-adventure movie, it's vastly superior to pretty much any you've seen in the past few years. As science fiction, it's thrilling, because it's pro-exploration and its most unambiguously heroic character is Weaver's character, Dr. Grace Augustine. It shouldn't feel so refreshing, to have a smart, heroic scientist whose scientific explanations are cool and important to the movie, but it is. Weaver has lost none of her fire, and is a joy to watch.

Sam Worthington, as Jake, does a great job of selling his slow transformation from cynical wise-ass human to a warrior of the Na'Vi people, without overplaying it. Worthington has that rare gift, of seeming totally down-to-Earth even when he's in the middle of a totally outlandish scene, and it keeps him completely relatable even as he's embracing a totally alien culture. He really does carry the movie, in both his human and alien bodies.

And you have to admire a movie whose central message is that only by becoming a wholly artificial life form can you touch something true and natural. This contradiction is at the heart of the movie — a luddite fable made with technology so advanced, Cameron had to create it from scratch.

Cameron deliberately avoids any of the usual cop-outs you'd see with this kind of story. The natives know from the first time they lay eyes on Jake that he's a "dream walker" (their word for alien meat-puppets operated by sleeping humans. And they call humans the "sky people.") When they come to accept Jake as one of them, it's with the knowledge that he's actually a tiny pink-skin in a tank somewhere. And the movie's arc isn't the standard one, of Jake realizing that he's "really" a human and should stop trying to pretend to be one of the aliens. Rather, becoming a genetically engineered, and hence synthetic, creature allows Jake to discover who he really is.

So, to sum up, everything you've heard or thought about Avatar is true. It's one of the most vivid, visceral movies you've ever seen. It's cheesy enough for ten Swiss villages. It's James Cameron delivering an action thrill ride, at the top of his game. It's a schlocky Dances With Wolves rip-off. It will transform the way you think about movies forever.

Cameron's early '90s "scriptment" is the kind of thing that shows that, while he may have loved the comics as a kid, he didn't necessarily understand them. For example, Peter's pre-Spider-Man awkwardness became defiance against modern culture in Cameron's hands:

PETER PARKER. Age 17. Peter is in the bathroom, popping a zit in the mirror. He puts on his glasses and checks his look in the mirror. Still the same. Nerdy. He doesn't care. Screw 'em... He thinks they are the real losers. They'll be flipping burgers while he's discovering the cure to cancer. We'll see who wins in the long run. He wears his isolation like a badge... with an air of superiority.

That's not the only essential change to the Spider-Man mythos: Uncle Ben doesn't give a "With great power comes great responsibility" speech - or, if he does, it's not mentioned in the scriptment - and Peter starts considering do-gooding before Ben's death (albeit with mixed results). J. Jonah Jameson is a television station owner, not Daily Bugle editor, and the Bugle doesn't appear in the film at all. The movie even ends with Peter winning Mary Jane's love by revealing that he's Spider-Man - the two of them, by that point, having shared a terrible love scene that hints at Cameron's Titanic script as well as shows that Peter's into bondage:

ON TOP OF THE BRIDGE TOWER. Hold a beat. We hear screams approaching. Spidey appears and sets her on terra firma. She clings to him, looking down and around in wonder. He has put the world at her feet. She can't believe this is happening to her.

In a dizzying down-angle we see how the suspension cables all meet radially at the top of the tower... like the treads of some vast spider web. Peter and MJ seem to sit at the very center of the web, surrounded by the lights of the city. It is a warm spring night. And the moment is pure magic.

She stands with her back against a girder, needing to feel something solid. Spider Man stands before her, a perfectly formed male silhouette with a soothing low voice.

SPIDER MAN
Courtship among the spiders is highly ritualized. It varies from species to species. The male spider may circle the female, or wave his front legs... to signal that he is not prey.

Spider Man moves in a hypnotic arc around her. He raises his hands in a dance-like movement. Lowers them.

SPIDER MAN
The female usually signals her willingness by an uncharacteristic passivity.

MJ takes a deep breath. Her lip trembles. Her knees are weak. Her eyes, though, are steady, gazing at the silhouette before her. She doesn't move or speak. He moves closer.

SPIDER MAN
In certain crab spiders, such as Xysticus, the male will attach strands of silk to the female... tying her limbs...

Spider Man moves his hand gracefully across her, and she sees the sheerest silk webbing glinting in the moonlight. First one wrist. Then the other. Hypnotic movement in the moonlight. Her arms are bound to the wall. Her breathing gets more rapid.

SPIDER MAN
Since the female can break free at any time, the bonds have only symbolic significance.

MARY JANE
The male must be very bold... to take such liberties with the predatory female.

SPIDER MAN
Yes. He is very bold. But he must also trust her.
(he moves very close)
Close your eyes.

He removes his mask and kisses her. Their mouths very slowly and very sensuously devour each other. Peter and MJ are locked together. He is mesmerizing, gentle, powerful. He pushes up her skirt. They make love, high above the world. She doesn't look.

Well, at least it's not as bad as this scene from earlier in the script:

THE NEXT DAY. Tight on Peter as he wakes up. He opens his eyes cautiously. Not knowing what to expect. PULL BACK to reveal that he is still in bed. All is normal. He breaths a sigh of relief. In fact... he feels pretty good. Lots of energy. He pulls back the covers and...

Something is causing the sheet to stick to him. He lifts it, revealing a sticky, white mass completely covering him, gluing him to his bedding.

OMG HIS WEBBING IS LIKE JIZZ I NEVER THOUGHT OF THAT BEFORE.

The villains of the piece are versions of Sandman and Electro, although they have different names for no immediately apparent reason (As does high school bully Flash Thompson, who becomes Nathan "Flash" McCreery. Maybe Cameron was working out some high school issues or something), and both end up dead during the climactic final battle (Sandman ends up turned into glass with the following, wonderful, description: "Sandman is a smoking lump of melted glass in the vague form of a man. Poised, cooling, in a position of agony. Like Michaelangelo's dying slave. His glass mouth is a shapeless pit of eternal pain. Bummer.").

You can read an illustrated version of Cameron's entire scriptment here, but we wouldn't blame you if you'd read enough already. While offering up enough visual thrills and surface spectacle that you know it would've made an exciting movie to watch, Cameron's Spider-Man shaves off so much of the weirdness of the character that it could be any generic teenage superhero saving his girlfriend and the The Day. We're happier this script stayed unmade and Sam Raimi got his chance to show off his superhero chops instead and, let's face it: Wouldn't the world rather have had Avatar than this, in the end?

Marcus Parcus spotted the similarity between James Cameron's lithe, catlike aliens and a character from the sixth issue of Timespirits, a short run comic by Steve Perry and Tom Yeates published in 1985. The long ears, the blue skin, the stripes, the lack of clothes all bear a striking resemblance to the Na'vi and Neytiri in particular. She even takes down her fair share of military men in the course of the issue. Parcus wonders, was Cameron a fan of the series?

You can see more pages from the issue, compared with shots of Neytiri at Marcus Parcus' Livejournal.

[via Super Punch]

Chances are, if you've looked at a weirdshistic record cover by Yes, Asia or other bands, you've admired Roger Dean's paintings of surreal landscapes. If you've ever seen all good people turn their heads each day, then you're already a Dean fan.

Connor Freff Cochran, founder of Conlan Press (which is busy putting out a bunch of Peter S. Beagle books, hosting Beagle's 52/50 poetry subscription service, and putting out art books) contacted us and suggested that Avatar's lush moon might have gained some inspiration from Dean. And when you look at Dean's artwork and compare it to the concept art we posted the other day, it's hard not to see the resemblance.

All of this makes me want to rent Avatar (when it's released on DVD) and see if I can sync it up with YesSongs.

Granted, I make this assertion not as one of those folks who saw the movie in the last day, just as someone who has seen the early footage from Comic Con and Avatar Day and the other clips released so far.

An interesting thing about seeing the footage at Comic Con: hours before the audience's first trip to Pandora, we got to see another 3D motion capture preview, scenes from Robert Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol. You can almost see the gears turning in Zemeckis' head when he introduces a new movie, the tweaks he made to try to improve his particular brand of mo-cap aided animation. Casting Jim Carrey, a man famous for being able to act beneath five pounds of makeup, in multiple roles was an inspired attempt to remedy the notorious flatness of his animated characters. But it proved impossible to forget that these characters were simply sophisticated digital puppets, with Ebenezer Scrooge nearly as ethereal as the ghosts he's scheduled to encounter.

While watching the Avatar footage, by contrast, it was so easy I was watching an animated movie. Certainly it's jarring to see a giant blue person standing next to humans when Sully is first connected to his Avatar body. But when the Na'vi step into their animated native habitat, it's easy to suspend that disbelief that so stubbornly hangs over Zemeckis' animation. Pandora and the Na'vi may be shy of photorealistic (although there are some incredible moments, especially during the Thanator chase and when Jake engages with his Banshee for the first time), but they do feel alive, the way their facial muscles move, the sometimes distracting way their ears twitch to convey emotion, the play of light in their eyes. At times, it almost looks like we're seeing actors in blue makeup rather than the motion capture mask. Cameron has very nearly crossed the uncanny valley and that's an achievement in itself.

But it's Pandora itself that's truly thrilling, thanks to a combination of multilayered 3D technology and Cameron's obsessive nature. Cameron has talked a great deal about how he and his army of concept artists and biologists designed every plant and creature on Pandora. It's an impressive feat (and I can't wait to see that bioluminescence again), but it's only a small component of what makes the planet seem real. Early viewers are describing Avatar as akin to a nature documentary on an alien world, and it goes far beyond glowing flora. When a Banshee lands on a tree or a Thanator runs through the forest, leaves fall. If a creature pounces on a stalk or branch, it splinters. These aren't small details Cameron and his team have inserted for the sake of realism; they're present throughout the early clips. More than that, in 3D, these components exist on different planes, each obeying the laws of physics independent of the others. When Sully first encounters Neytiri, the air is simply stuffed with bugs, embers, and bits of dust, and their depth is such that you imagine you could stick your hand in it and swirl it around. I've been fairly 3D-agnostic until this point; I enjoy the novelty of movies where the 3D reaches out and grabs you, but I've never found it adds much to the experience. Avatar's 3D, which pulls you in instead of reaching out, does create a special experience, that sense that you are actually present, looking inside an entirely invented world.

However, the technology, as amazing as it is, leaves us with a lot of questions. Is there a point to all this spectacle? Is this good filmmaking? Avatar is antithetical to the Hitchcockian mode of filmmaking, where the director carefully controls the audience's gaze. In Avatar, Cameron gleefully surrenders that kind of control, inviting us instead to look all over the screen and try to drink in as much as humanly possible as we go along. In fact, I imagine that a good deal of Avatar's repeat business will come from a sense that viewers missed a lot the first time around. I haven't seen the film in its entirety yet, but I can't help but wonder if all that spectacle distracts from other aspects of the movie. And, if it works well with Cameron's particular brand of filmmaking, will it work equally well with others'?

As for its purpose, Cameron has set it to worldbuilding — and the idea that you can create a global, digital set that you can return to any time. And you can extrapolate big things from that — incredibly detailed video games, franchises set and filmed on many worlds by many filmmakers. But it's important to remember that Cameron and his team built this technology as they went along. Early reviews indicate that Avatar stands up as a movie on its own, but it's also a proof of concept. I can't imagine that Cameron has found the exhaustive — or even the best — uses for his remarkable motion capture and animation technologies. I would love to see what happens when this technology lands in the hands of someone whose craft is animation. Avatar itself might not change all movies forever, but I'll wager that the technology that birthed it will give rise to something wonderful — and stranger than we could have imagined before.

MTV managed to ask Cameron about reports that he and veteran screenwriter Salermo were collaborating on a new film, and he explained that it's not Salermo's Kurosawa-themed unproduced screenplay Doomsday Protocol. Rather, Cameron is producing a Salermo-scripted remake of Fantastic Voyage, in which a team of scientists shrinks themselves and goes inside an assassinated diplomat, on the brink of death, to perform emergency surgery on a blood clot in his brain.

As MTV points out, this remake could have way better special effects than the original — although Raquel Welch surely counts as a special effect. And also the improved special effects could be a double-edged sword, since the temptation to focus on cool animations of leukocytes instead of actual story could be pretty overwhelming. Plus, it couldn't possibly be as great as these gems:

Cameron has promised us that Avatar represents a huge technological advancement, a blending of real-world performances and imagination that will transport us to the foreign world of Pandora in an immersive, visceral way. But developers of medical technologies are looking to achieve the same sort of experience with the world we have, and the entertainment industry's advances in image capture and graphics processing are paving the way.

Certainly medicine is no stranger to computer animation, something they have long used to explain concepts and train personnel. And motion capture has been used for years in gait analysis. Physiotherapists often film patients wearing reflective motion capture markers to analyze their gait, in much the way that filmmakers use motion capture markers on their actors.

But the demand for improved computer graphics technology graphics from the entertainment industry means more sophisticated applications in medicine as well. Just this fall, Nvidia, which develops graphics processing technology for, among other things, gaming systems, demonstrated how the technology used to create immersive 3D experiences for games can also create immersive experiences of the human body. Along with Siemens Healthcare, Nvidia has developed an ultrasound viewing experience that sounds like it was scripted by Cameron: parents and healthcare workers can put on a pair of stereoscopic glasses and examine a fetus as if they were looking directly inside the womb. The demonstration comes just months after Nvida released its GeForce 3D Vision system, with a pair of stereoscopic glasses to improve the immersive experience of playing video games and watching 3D movies.

For filmmakers like Cameron, the goal is to capture the detail of the human experience, down to the most minute muscle movements and to create worlds that are so detailed as to appear real. If he's successful in creating an experience with Avatar that gives audiences both a fully immersive experience of a world that's completely invented and manages to translate the twitches of the human face onto an animated alien, imagine what his technology could accomplish when simply reflecting a world that actually exists. Perhaps the legacy of Cameron, Zemeckis, and other filmmakers working in these fields will include advances in virtual surgery, diagnosis, and other innovations in the medical field.

We interviewed creature designers Wayne Barlowe and Neville Page, plus concept artists James Clyne, Ryan Church and Daphne Yap, about creating a whole new universe from scratch. Plus we've got some stunning concept art, from the new book The Art Of Avatar. In a year that's seen some amazing books of movie concept art, The Art Of Avatar features 106 pages of lush full-color paintings, interspersed with the industry's greatest design minds geeking out about every little aspect of Avatar's creation.

So here are a few things you didn't know about the design of James Cameron's Avatar:

Avatar Started As A Four-Month, Late-Night Jam Session At James Cameron's House

"[We'd be] working late at Jim's house, and having him come back after a three week spell of being down at the freaking Titanic, and having him tell us a story [about being on the ocean floor]." Read the rest of the story.

Pandora's creatures were partly based on cars

Early on in the process, James Cameron "mentioned the core idea" of having Pandora's creatures be "superslick and aerodynamic, and be like a race car with racing stripes," says creature designer Neville Page. Read the rest of the story.

Those crazy color schemes are from the ocean floor — and Art Nouveau

"In the real world, we didn't invent these colors. They exist on animals today. We didn't invent a whole new palette. I think the problem is — the challenge is — you don't often see large creatures with this much color on them." Read the rest of the story.

The human hardware, including those crazy battlesuits, is all based on real stuff

"One thing I worked on big interior for the mech suits, and the whole interior had to have a reason and function for why the suits were lined up the way they were, and how they could work on them like a pit-stop at an F1 race. It had to have that functionality." Read the rest of the story.

Avatar concept art from The Art Of Avatar (Abrams 2009)

Production Weekly reports via Twitter that Cameron is developing a science fiction "event" film set in the future and scripted by Shane Salerno, who worked on the screenplays for Armageddon, Ghost Rider, and both Alien vs. Predator movies. Production Weekly hasn't elaborated further, but speculation is that the script is Doomsday Protocol, which Salerno sold to Fox last year. The Hollywood Reporter has the synopsis:

Plot details are being kept under wraps, but it is known to be an epic science fiction adventure in the vein of "The Seven Samurai" involving a group of aliens and humans with various abilities who are brought together to save Earth.

So what's it ultimately going to be for Cameron — space age samurai, post-apocalyptic cyborg, or another swing through the Avatar universe?

James Cameron's next film may be a sci-fi samurai epic [SCI FI Wire]

Top image by Daniel Conway.

Wired magazine's recent story about the making of Avatar contained the following passage:

Cameron is trying to show me something with a laser pointer. He queues up a scene towards the end of Avatar and freezes the frame on an image of a large crowd of Na'vi. He uses the pointer to draw attention to an ornate headdress composed of hundreds of tiny beads. The onscreen image is amazingly crisp, and the headdress appears utterly real. Each bead was designed by a digital artist, Cameron says, so it would look handmade. "Every leaf, every blade of grass in this world was created," he says, and his laser pointer streaks across the screen, alighting on so many things I can't follow its path.

When I read that, I thought to myself, that's everything that's wrong with CGI movies. I'm always torn when it comes to live action movies that rely so heavily on CGI'd surroundings and special effects: On the one hand, it's amazing what can be done with the technology, but on the other, it's depressing seeing what has been done with it, as well. CGI has become the atom bomb of movie special effects: Yes, we have the technology to "fix" everything, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we should use it.

In many ways, the argument against the overuse of CGI is like critic Douglas Wolk's complaint against autotune in modern pop music:

And now, the smallest errors are vanishing, too. The gift that modern digital technology has given pop music is the ability to fix every nagging inconsistency in a recording, note by note and beat by beat. If you hear a contemporary mainstream rock record, you're almost certainly hearing something that has been digitally nipped and tucked and buffed until it shines.

The little inconsistencies in musicians' performances aren't just glitches, though: They're exactly what we respond to as listeners — the part that feels like "style," or even like "rock." The exciting part of guitar-bass-drum-voice music is the alchemy of specific musicians playing with each other, and the way those musicians' idiosyncratic senses of timing and articulation and emphasis relate to each other. That's where the rhythmic force of rock 'n' roll comes from; that's also why a great band can replace one of its members with someone who's technically a more skillful musician, only to discover that their instrumental chemistry isn't there anymore.

Watching movies where CGI has created entire worlds like Pandora - or The Lord of The Rings' Middle Earth or anywhere in the three Star Wars prequels, for that matter - and what you're seeing may be technically impressive and the work of hundreds of artists up and down the moviemaking food chain, but none of it entirely convinces; there's a distance that we, as viewers, instinctively pick up on because what we're watching is so fake that it can't even convincingly fake verisimilitude. It doesn't matter how many how many hours or computer modeling programs have been spent to create "lifelike" scenery or surroundings, it will always lack the element of chaos, the potential for mistakes, that makes it something we can believe (and lose ourselves) in. Moviemakers today can try and distract us from that missing piece - with occasionally unintentional results; how many times do we watch something and think that it's impressive or "must have taken a lot of work," and not notice that we're being taken even further out of the story in order to do so - but there hasn't been any CGI-centric creation that has managed to replace it, yet.

More worryingly, CGI has given free rein to the worst, most-OCD elements of moviemakers' imaginations. Whereas, before, worldbuilding would have meant coming up with the strongest stories and performances in order to pull audiences in, now both of those seem to often take backseats to the spectacle of the spectacle itself (Think of this summer's Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, which didn't appear to make sense, or again, the Star Wars prequels, where Lucas as a director was clearly more in love with the technology responsible for the worlds he was building than the actors and dialogue he was populating them with). That James Cameron has created languages, flora and fauna and hundreds of elements for Avatar's Pandora that we may not even really see in the finished product is, at once, both an impressive and incredibly frustrating feat: Good for him for being so dedicated, but without a good story, it'll be the most expensive window dressing for a store that no-one wants to shop at.

As technology has become more and more adept at literally translating someone's imagination into a finished product, so, it seems, has the focus of filmmaking become using that technology: Pushing it to create new things, replace reality as closely as possible and take out all of the confusion, disarray and accidents of the real world. But in doing so, actually imagining things seems to have become diminished, both in terms of the creators - because flights of fancy soon become weighed down by translating them into something that computers can understand and model in visually "believable" terms - and in terms of the audience, who now get imaginary worlds presented to them in as close to photo-realistic terms as possible, but missing any genuine life. What we're left with, then, are movies overpowered by themselves, making everything more "perfect," more sterile and more lifeless than what we've seen before, no matter what our eyes may tell us.

Of course, I'm writing this before seeing Avatar, so maybe I'm wrong; maybe Cameron has spent enough time on the story, perhaps all the actors involved do wonderful work, and all of the work that's gone into the CGI has created everything we've been promised: an immersive, believable new world unlike everything we've ever seen before. But everytime I think of Cameron boasting to the Wired journalist about the CGI-creation of blades of grass - because, obviously, real grass isn't good enough sometimes - I worry that it'll just be more of the same old empty razzle-dazzle.

Now let's take bets, how much screen time do we think Michelle Rodriguez will get until she is killed off in a flurry of shouting and gunfire?

Plus here are two new featurettes one about the story and another about the planet in particular. The first is actually quite brilliant because it has Sigourney Weaver narrating like she would for The Planet Earth documentaries.

[via IGN]

In a press release to Variety Halycon announced the auction would be closing:

"Over the past few weeks, Halcyon and its professionals have engaged in in-depth discussions and negotiations with numerous serious potential buyers, including several major movie studios," Halcyon said. "In addition, a number of attractive refinancing alternatives have also been presented. In order to maximize the value of a transaction for all of the company's creditors and stakeholders, we are fully analyzing all these options."

Haylcon, which has filed for bankruptcy, explained in November that they would find their "stalking horse" bid, or one bid which they pick as representing a minimum bid price for the assets. But apparently, they have done away with this part of the process. Many people believe that this is a bad sign for the future of Skynet.

Over at Nikki Finke's blog the comments are pretty telling:

From: Fan of the First Three Terminators, Not This One:
Look at it logically. These dopes paid 25 million for the franchise (well, they defaulted on the payments, and got sued by the hedge fund that loaned them the money but why get technical?) They got sued by their producing partner for 160 million bucks for fraud before the film even opened because they were already welching on money they owed people. They filed for bankruptcy before the DVD even came out. This Terminator grossed 60 million less than the last one, despite the rise in ticket prices. And since DVD sales are in the toilet everywhere, and that's where a high-budget tentpole actually goes into profit, whoops, no profit. Oh, and the TV show from the franchise tanked too. Also the video game and the Six Flags ride, because Six Flags went bankrupt.

Maybe the Pizza Hut Terminator Salvation Pizza was good, that I don't know, but if it was like the movie it cost too much to make, came in a flashy package, but was ultimately flat and tasteless. Therefore this franchise is worth:

From Warner Borg:
I'll tell you what the problem is here. They are expecting someone to offer a big money for the rights and no one has. And frankly, no one will.

Why? Because the Terminator brand is played out at this point. It needs to go away for a few years and then reappear with some hot new talent behind the camera. No one is going to pay a premium for a franchise they can't get started ASAP. If someone like Fox or WB does snap up the rights to the franchise then expect them to get it for a bargain and sit on the rights for a few years.

The numbers that were being floated around by Halcyon ($75m+ !!!!!!!) for the rights were absolutely laughable.

It's sad, but we tend to agree. James Cameron should just buy this up on the cheap, and decide who should be in charge of resurrecting this series. But if this goes the way people are predicting, it could be many, many years until we see another Terminator film — and don't hold your breath for a worthy installment.