The story, without spoilers
In 2154, with Earth exhausted, a mining company has set up operations on Pandora, a lush, dangerous moon whose forests are home to the Na'vi, a tall, blue-skinned people. Scientists study them through avatars, bred Na'vi bodies that a human mind can drive from a link chamber.
Jake Sully, a former Marine who uses a wheelchair, is offered his late twin brother's place in the programme. Inside his avatar he can run again, and a chance encounter with Neytiri, a Na'vi hunter, draws him into her clan. The company's security chief has his own use for Jake, and the closer he gets to the Na'vi, the harder it becomes to serve both sides.
Much of the film's running time is spent learning Pandora, as Jake does: the floating mountains, the glowing forest at night, the creatures the Na'vi ride and the deep connection they have with the living world around them. The pleasure of discovery is the point, and it gives weight to the conflict that follows, because by then the audience understands what stands to be lost.
Behind the scenes
James Cameron wrote an 80-page treatment for Avatar in 1994, drawing on science-fiction books he had read in childhood, and then waited for the technology to catch up with his idea. When production came, the live-action footage was shot with a modified version of the Fusion Camera System, a digital 3D rig Cameron developed with Vince Pace.
The Na'vi were created with performance capture, which recorded the actors' bodies and faces and transferred them to digital characters, and much of Pandora was built in the computer. The film won Oscars for art direction, cinematography and visual effects, a fair summary of where its innovation lay. James Horner, who had scored Cameron's Titanic, wrote the music.
Cameron drew on science-fiction books he had read as a child and on the adventure novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Filming was meant to follow Titanic for a 1999 release, but Cameron felt the technology was not ready. Work on the Na'vi language began in 2005, and he developed the screenplay and the wider world from early 2006. The visual effects were made with Weta Digital, and some estimates put the real production cost between $280 million and $310 million, with a further $150 million for promotion. Jon Landau, his Titanic co-producer, produced again.
The cast was led by Sam Worthington as Jake and Zoe Saldaña as Neytiri, with Stephen Lang as the security chief Colonel Quaritch, Sigourney Weaver as the scientist Grace Augustine and Michelle Rodriguez as the pilot Trudy Chacón. Their performance capture work had to read through the Na'vi faces, so the actors' expressions are carried into the finished characters.
Why it still matters
Avatar has been the box-office benchmark of the modern era. It became the highest-grossing film of all time in 2010 and held the title until 2019, then regained it in 2021 after a re-release in China and kept it until 2026, when the Encore re-release of Avengers: Endgame moved ahead. Its total stands at $2.924 billion on a reported budget of $237 million.
It helped make 3D a selling point for cinemas for a time and showed what performance capture could do with a whole species of characters. Its sequels have continued the story, and the original remains the film other blockbusters are measured against.
It was the first film to gross more than $2 billion, the best-selling video title of 2010 in the United States, and, adjusted for inflation, it sits second only to Gone with the Wind. Its success also led electronics manufacturers to release 3D televisions. The sequels The Way of Water (2022) and Fire and Ash (2025) have followed, with two more in development.