Oh sure, you might be getting nine extra minutes of footage if you buy a ticket for re-released “Avatar” this weekend, but in a couple of months when you pick that the special edition DVD and BluRay not only are going to get another extended cut featuring a total of 16 minutes additional footage, there’s gonna be another 45 minutes of deleted scenes with unfinished special effects.
That’s a whole lotta Pandora.
Speaking with The Oregonian (via /Film), James Cameron revealed that among the extra sequences in the upcoming home video cut of the film will be Earth-set opening that was ultimately scrapped from the theatrical version. And from Cameron says, fans will be thrilled.
“….if you buy the box set in November, you can sit down, and in a continuous screening of the film, watch it with the Earth opening….It works very well. It just takes a long time to get the movie started. You have to be sort of predisposed to like the movie like a fan, you know what I mean? And then you can sit and you can have a great ride — a different telling of “Avatar.” Not inconsistent — it’s just the stuff that happened off-camera.
We call it “the Earth opening.” It’s about 4 1/2 minutes of stuff. And it was in for the longest time. It was very late in the day that we took it out. I walked in one day and said to my two editors, ‘Guys, I want each of you to cut a new version of the start of the film, Reel 1, that doesn’t have any Earth in it at all.’ And they looked at me like I was out of my mind. And I said, “No — it’s gonna work.”
And if that isn’t enough, Cameron adds, “It’s [also] got like 45 minutes of unfinished deleted scenes that exist in a supplement where you can just play the scenes individually.” There are going to be a lot nerds not seeing daylight for a few days after this comes out.
No firm date yet on when the DVD/BluRay special edition of the film will hit, but you can probably expect under your Christmas/Kwanzaa/Hanukkah thingy come December. The not-so-extended re-release of “Avatar” is in theaters now.