‘Avatar’ to hit the screens on Dec. 18

A decade and more after ‘Titanic’, hit director James Cameron turns the spotlight of fame on himself again. ‘Avatar’, the quadri-lingual film in English, Hindi, Telugu and Tamil is all set to hit the screens here on December 18.

As for Andhra Pradesh, the distributor is B. Madhu, the man who produced ‘Tagore’ with megastar Chiranjeevi and ‘Ghajini’ with Aamir Khan. He says the Telugu version was releasing on 200 screens with 150 prints.

Starring Sigourney Weaver, Michelle Rodriguez, Sam Worthington, C.C.H. Pounder, Giovanni Ribisi, Stephen Lang and Zoe Saldana, the 161-minute film was under production for almost 12 years and is the most expensive in world history, costing a whopping Rs. 2,400 crore. It may be recalled that ‘Titanic’ cost about Rs. 1,100 crore. The most expensive Telugu film was the Ramcharan Tej-starrer ‘Magadheera’, directed by S.S. Rajamouli that cost Rs. 38 crore and grossed revenues in excess of Rs. 65 crore.
New trend

The entire film has a blue backdrop and the story per se is about ‘blue’ people on another planet. The digital intermediary, graphics and special effects component is 60 per cent and only 40 per cent has shots of people and places.

Also, it is set to usher in a new trend for Hollywood films in India, becoming the first-ever 3-D Hollywood to be released in regional languages too. Until now, 3-D films like ‘Ice Age’ were only dubbed in Hindi, while ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ and ‘2012’ were dubbed in Telugu and Tamil too.

Producer M. Shyamprasad Reddy, who made ‘Arundhati’ most recently says, “I don’t think I have ever waited so much for a film to release. And the high expectations are simply because it comes from a man like James Cameron who made films like ‘Aliens’, ‘True Lies’, ‘Abyss’ and ‘Titanic’.”

Multiplexes across the country are said to have upgraded their technology to screen this 3-D film.

Vijay Singh of Fox Star Studios India says, the local market for Hollywood films was growing fast.