James Cameron Unveils "Avatar" Franchise Started with a Dream

Canadian filmmaker James Cameron revealed that the idea for "Avatar" came to him in a dream. 

In an interview with GQ, the filmmaker revealed that the initial ideas for the Avatar franchise came to him in a dream when he was only 19 years old. 

After he had the dream, he decided to do some drawings that became really early concepts of the highest-budget movie of all time. 

Cameron also knew it wouldn’t be an easy project to bring to life, so first, he had to establish himself as a hitmaker before a studio would trust him to tell the story of blue aliens fighting for their homeland, Pandora.

“I woke up after dreaming of this kind of bioluminescent forest with these trees that look kind of like fiber-optic lamps and this river that was glowing bioluminescent particles and kind of purple moss on the ground that lit up when you walked on it. And these kinds of lizards didn’t look like much until they took off. And then they turned into these rotating fans, kind of like living Frisbees, and they come down and land on something," he noted.

Cameron added: "It was all in the dream. I woke up super excited and I actually drew it. So I actually have a drawing. It saved us from about 10 lawsuits,".

"Any successful film, there’s always some freak with tinfoil under their wig that thinks you’ve beamed the idea out of their head. And it turned out there were 10 or 11 of them. And so I pointed at this drawing I did when I was 19, when I was going to Fullerton Junior College, and said, ‘See this? See these glowing trees? See this glowing lizard that spins around, that’s orange? See the purple moss?’ And everybody went away.” 

However, the whole future of the "Avatar" franchise is at risk of not seeing the light of day for the project has cost so much that "Avatar: The Way of Water" needs to become one of the highest-grossing movies ever just to break even – meaning that anything less than two billion dollars in ticket sales could put the future of the franchise in jeopardy. 

Cameron noted that the franchise was extremely expensive and that the sequel was “the worst business case in movie history”.

"Avatar: The Way of Water" hits the theaters on December 16. You can watch the latest trailer below: