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Here’s the first paragraph of an item that ran this morning on Deadline, reproduced in full:

It’s been nearly eight years since James Cameron’s Avatar took the global box office by storm, and while it’s become très chic for some corners of the internet to endlessly bash Avatar, I still maintain my stubborn affection for Cameron’s movie. Very few filmmakers can create action-driven science-fiction that operates at Cameron’s level; just look at how many times people have messed up Cameron’s Terminator franchise, a near-flawless formula for blockbuster movies that studios have nevertheless run directly into the ground. We may laugh at Cameron’s planned sequels, but they are both original (technically!) and creator-driven movies. Isn’t that what we claim to want from Hollywood?

With Avatar 2 delayed yet again, it’s starting to sound like we’ll never see James Cameron’s much-hyped return to Pandora and his tribe of blue aliens. That is, unless you can grab yourselves some tickets to Walt Disney World’s Animal Kingdom and hop onto their new “Pandora — The World of Avatar” ride. The concept has been teased for months, and today we get our first look inside at all the magic, and, honestly, it looks pretty incredible.

The Avatar franchise has turned into James Cameron’s Xanadu, a vanity project of staggering scale to which the public will seemingly never be permitted access. It’s kept him busy since 2009, as he’s concurrently scripted a whopping four sequels to the immensely lucrative 2009 sci-fi epic. Perhaps, one day, it shall be his tomb. But to us unwashed rabble in the general populace, the grand Avatar franchise is little more than an idea, and a weird idea at that. As our beloved Editor-in-Chief Matt Singer noted not too long ago, pretty much everybody has moved on from Avatar as a cultural touchstone. Cameron seems more jazzed about this plan than anyone else, but he’ll have to put his dreams on hold for a little while longer.

So long as you’re not bothered by the ruthless capitalistic spirit of six-dollar bottled water and don’t stumble into the clandestine torture facility concealed within the giant EPCOT globe, everyone loves Disney’s amusement parks. They earned the title of Happiest Place on Earth through a militant doctrine of mandated cheer, and with a new amusement park based on James Cameron’s unkillable sci-fi series Avatar opening soon, they’ll add the distinction of Trippiest Place on Earth to their pedigree. Today brings two brief sneak peeks at the facility set to open this summer, and it’s like you can already hear the hallucinating 20-year-olds begging to be let off the ride.

Why is it that James Cameron’s updates about progress on his colossal plotted Avatar franchise always kind of sound like threats? In a brash nose-thumbing to the concept of economic bubbles, James Cameron went all in on his Avatar franchise gambit and decided to produce the next four films in the planned pentalogy concurrently...

Not content merely to conquer our existing world, James Cameron figured he’d build one of his own. This summer, Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Orlando will cut the ribbon on “Pandora — the World of AVATAR,” a new attraction replicating the lush world from Cameron’s immensely profitable 2009 sci-fi film. The director, producer, and heads of construction for the developing theme park all appeared in a new behind-the-scenes video preview that gives prospective viewers an eyeful of what the creator claim to be the most technologically sophisticated amusement at Disney, if not in the world.

I’m probably the only person in the world who is actually excited for more Avatar movies. It’s a fact I made my peace with ages ago. If more Avatar films means more opportunities for James Cameron to direct large-scale futuristic war movies, and demonstrate more of the gruff “brothers-in-arms” humor that made Aliens such a success, then you can go ahead and make your Braveheart jokes. I’ll suffer through some wonky storytelling if it means more Cameron action sequences, thank you very much.

As was widely expected, Star Wars: The Force Awakens passed Avatar as the highest grossing movie of all-time on Wednesday morning. It was a record many, including George Lucas, thought would never be broken; The Force Awakens did it in just 20 da

The design of the Na’vi was one of the most striking parts of James Cameron’s Avatar, an entire race of people with their own look and language. But the look of the Na’vi didn’t come from Cameron or his talented team of artists. They actually came from his mom. Yes, the design of the Na’vi came from a dream James Cameron’s mother had and relayed to her son. That’s just one of the facts packed into the latest episode of You Think You Know Movies, which takes you on an unexpected journey behind the scenes of Avatar !