Cameron Justifies Double Dipping on “Avatar”

Remember all those great deleted scenes and inside looks at the making of “Avatar” that were supposed to be part of the Blu Ray and DVD release?

They’ll get here eventually.

Until then, director James Cameron says that while the first release of the film will have the movie and nothing more.  We won’t even get copies of the trailers to help preserve room on the disc and make sure that the transfer is up to his high standards.

Then the film is to be re-edited and re-released to theaters later this year.  After that, we’ll get a super deluxe, bells and whistles release of the film that Cameron has been talking about for some time now.  Look for it around November.

“I think it’d be fun for fans in November to really get a chance to look under the hood of what we were thinking when we made the movie,” Cameron tells SciFi Wire “Even though we took things out, I think they’ll see why we took them out, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy them in and of themselves. For example, there’s a whole four-and-a-half-minute sequence of scenes that takes place on Earth before Jake even flies to Pandora. We’ll stick that in kind of an additional scene supplement. You can see it if you want to see it, but you’re not going to get to watch the movie as a continuous experience with that being the opening.”

Cameron is planning to reinstate some deleted scenes for a possible theatrical release this summer. “The stuff we would put back for the re-release in the summer if we pull all that off—and I’m not sure that’s going to happen—if we do, they’re not going to be talking-heads scenes that are boring,” Cameron continued. “We have tons of that as well, lots of character stuff that was taken out. I think there is a winnowing process. You do make decisions as you go along, and some of those decisions should be irrevocable. Other decisions, maybe based more on running time or pace, it’s okay to reinsert some things. It doesn’t change the major kind of transition moments of a movie.”

In the Na’vi love scene, Cameron actually cut out shots of Jake and Neytiri attaching their queues (braids) as they do to bond with animals and nature. Cameron is game to put some full-frontal Tsahaylu back in the re-release.

“They don’t do it in the film because, quite frankly, people were freaked out by it,” Cameron explained. “We’re just going to put it back in. If we do the re-release, that will be one of the things that we look at possibly reinstating.”

There is a bar fight involving Jake Sully in his wheelchair. However, that only belongs on the November DVD release. “You’ll get it in November but not reinstated into the body of the film, because that takes place on Earth in the beginning, and that’s not how the movie begins,” Cameron said. “I think once those key creative decisions are made, I don’t think you go back from them. You’ll have it in the supplement. We’re not going to put that back, because I now really like the way the film opens.”

The visual effects artists at Weta Digital have to begin work now to have the deleted scenes completed in time for a November DVD release. “We’re just getting into it,” Cameron said. “I’ve earmarked the scenes that I want to have completed by Weta, because that has to be done now. A lot of those decisions about the supplement are going to be made over the next few months.”

Of course, there could be ANOTHER dip when the film is released for 3-D home theaters.

So if you want a full bells and whistles version of “Avatar” wait until November.  If you want just the movie, you can pick it up next month.