In 2014, Walt Disney World Resort began construction of its ambitious project to bring the moon, Pandora, from James Cameron's movie Avatar, to life in Disney Animal Kingdom. Fans of the epic adventure have actually been waiting since it was officially announced in 2013.
Now, three years later, Disney Parks has finally unveiled a two-and-a-half minute sneak peek into the incredible alien world that awaits visitors in the summer of 2017.
The first-look video was released on Dec. 25, a perfect Christmas present from Disney Parks. It was also perfectly timed to get the fans excited for Summer and, perhaps, a suitable way to sustain the fan excitement until Avatar 2 is released in December 2018, or so James Cameron says. We can't really be sure if that is truly final since the film release kept getting delayed.
A Peek Into Pandora At Disney
Disney Parks made sure that Pandora would truly resemble the fictional world in the film, if the $500 million investment is any indication of that. Pandora replaced Camp Minnie-Mickey and was built on the area where an attraction revolving around mythical creatures called "Beastly Kingdom" was planned but never built.
If it is any consolation, visitors can just consider the fictional beasts in Pandora as a mythical creature.
The video features the man who brought Avatar to life and who has been keeping the fans hanging on for the sequels, James Cameron, and he is very much awed with how Disney Parks brought his imagined world to life.
We think it is safe to say that, if the creator of the world himself was amazed with the outcome of the park's attraction, it is definitely worth visiting even if you would have to wait in a long line just to experience it.
"I don't know if I can even express how it feels to see something that I imagined in 1995 suddenly made physically made real," Cameron expressed in the video. "You're going to plunge, you're going to dive, you're going to see the world flying through it," he said about Pandora's premiere attraction "Avatar: Flight of Passage."
"This is a huge ensemble job: digital design artists, structural engineers, robotics technicians... It's a stunning amount of innovation to make one believable world [...],"Joe Rohde, Senior Vice President-Creative for Walt Disney Imagineering said.
Watch the sneak peek below.
Here's a video about Pandora narrated by Sigourney Weaver for the 2009 film "Avatar" so you can compare the two.
Now we're really pumped for the sequels! Unfortunately, the only thing we really know for sure about Avatar 2 is that James Cameron decided to make four more sequels with planned releases in 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2023.
