While there’s an ever-increasing roster of trips to the GFFA planned on the big and small screen, we’re also on the cusp of the return of another major sci-fi franchise – Avatar.
While there’s little comparison in the scale of the two franchises, it needs to be remembered that Avatar is the highest grossing film in cinema history by a long way, and has beaten Star Wars to the punch by having a major park attraction in a Disney park with the World of Pandora area at Animal Kingdom.
Screenrant take a look at the two franchises and how, with both series under the Disney umbrella with the 20th Century Fox purchase close to completion, the two titans won’t be stepping on each others toes.
Understanding the value of both investments, Disney will want to maximize their respective profits and put them in a position where they can thrive. Typically, the studio is quite savvy about spacing out their various tentpoles so each one has a nice time period to itself. Just this year, Infinity War (April) made $2 billion, Incredibles 2 (June) crossed $1 billion, and Ant-Man and the Wasp (July) made $622 million worldwide. Solo was a flop, but Disney learned a lesson from that situation, and ideally that’ll be a fluke, rather than a harbinger of things to come.
In essence, Avatar becomes one less problem for Lucasfilm to worry about, and so far they’ve enjoyed a peaceful coexistence with Disney’s other properties. Disney will have to pull off quite a balancing act to make it all work, but so far there’s no reason to believe they’ll fail at it. Even though Star Wars is going to go on a (brief) hiatus from theaters, the galaxy far, far away will still be present in other platforms, including live-action television (streaming service Disney+ will be home to two separate series), so fans will still be able to get their fix, following new stories and characters. And as Kathleen Kennedy (who recently extended her contract) plots the course of the future, there’s less pressure on her to crack the perfect formula.
