Thought this might be interesting to share for anyone who’s interested in cross-media entertainment / promotion / merchandising.
Avatar was the best thing I’ve seen at the movies in years. Technology and beautiful effects aside, I was really impressed that the story was compelling and the world thoroughly immersive. I could have watched it again straight away, and was keen to get online to dive into whatever extended material I could find. Even crazier, for the first time ever I came out of a film keen to pick up the game that goes along with the film. I’d heard it was average but didn’t care, it was a window back into Pandora and I was itching for more. So I was the perfect consumer right? They had me hook line and sinker, but that’s when it went down hill a bit.
Firstly, the internet. Oh my how it can make or break things. While anything that gets as big as Avatar will have its creepy devout followers, this new age of connectedness has made these overly enthusiastic fans more visible than any official content. Na’vi photoshop and makeup tutorials are flooding the internet to the enthrallment of said devout fans, and entertainment of others (lets just say they’re not laughing with them). I’m now trying to avoid all this stuff as it’s really detracting from the movie’s appeal. As Mark put it: it’s making Avatar seriously uncool. How do you counteract this? Not sure, potentially make your own web presence more powerful, entertaining, and cool than poking fun at the nerds.
Next, the game. I fired up the demo for PC and was immediately impressed by the visuals. Awesome presentation of Pandora. But then I got down to playing and was put on the end of rockets, flame throwers, machine guns etc, tasked with plowing through a stretch of Pandorian forest before mowing down a tribe of Na’vi. What…the…hell? You’ve just spent 3 hours building this deep sympathetic bond with this alien race and planet and now you’re asking me to burn and butcher them both? Right, nice. I’m assuming the demo is focused on the human side because its better than the Na’vi gameplay. I think they should have realized their key selling point was seeing Pandora through the eyes of a Na’vi, people have already got enough Gears of War / Halo.
Right, rant over, time to go and see it again in IMAX 
