The legendary Avatar trilogy, which has recently become the highest grossing in the history of cinema, is the director’s most famous creation James Cameronbut when do its origins date back?
We know that work on the first Avatar film began actively in the 1990sbut thanks to the acclaimed celebratory exhibition The Art of James Cameron, which at the beginning of 2025 we were lucky enough to be able to admire also in Italy given that it was hosted by the Turin Cinema Museum from February to August, it was confirmed that the first seeds of ideas for the world of Pandora date back to the late 70s.
As evidenced by the concept art that you can admire at the bottom of the article – and which is part of the exhibition The Art of James Cameron – many visual ideas that characterize the world of Avatar can be found in the concept art that the then very young artist created for the short film Xenogenesisa 12-minute science fiction film created from a budget of $20,000 (and which caught the attention of legendary producer Roger Corman, who decided to hire James Cameron to work on Battle Beyond the Stars and Piranha II).
The concepts show us some creatures that look an awful lot like ikransthe flying animals of the Na’vi introduced in the first Avatar in 2009, but also of sky jellyfish extremely similar to those we recently saw in Avatar: Fire and Ashused by the Tlalim, the People of the Wind, to move in the skies above Pandora.
In short, although the Avatar project actually began in 1996when Cameron wrote a first version of the script and jotted down the first practical estimates for the budget (realizing that it would be impossible to achieve at the time), many visual ideas of Pandora have been in his mind throughout the 80s.
Avatar: Fire and Ashes is in theaters now.
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