james cameron oscars 2010


James Cameron is happy with those Oscars. How about some DVD sales?


It's Earth Day, and James Cameron is celebrating with a "bare-bones" release of the "Avatar" DVD.

The idea is to tie in "Avatar's" green themes with Earth Day's 40th anniversary.

Fox plans to release a DVD brimming with extras this November. But as Cameron explains in the video below: "You can't have that yet!"

Why let a DVD with no extras hit the shelves?

Cameron told Entertainment Weekly he's waiting for Fox to pony up the money to finish six minutes worth of CG scenes that were cut from the movie.

But we all know it's about News Corp. (NWS) trying to squeeze out as much DVD revenue as possible.

As Variety's Marc Graser notes, there's a lot riding on "Avatar's" DVD and Blu-ray sales. 

"Avatar" was the highest-grossing movie of all time, bringing in $2.7 billion at the box office and $400 million to News Corp (so far). So if people don't want to buy this movie on DVD and Blu-ray, it's probably a really bad sign for the declining homevideo business in general.

To put it in perspective, "The Twilight Saga: New Moon" sold more than 4 million DVDs when it hit shelves the third weekend in March. Graser writes that anything less than 7 million in "Avatar's" first week "will be considered a disappointment for 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment."

So it's smart that Fox is trying to boost sales by doing a big Earth Day release for the initial 'Avatar' DVD and then following up in November with the lots-of-extras-and-deleted-scenes version. True 'Avatar' junkies are bound to pick up both.

That's not to take anything away from Cameron's Earth Day love:

I remember the first Earth Day 40 years ago, this was around the time when I was forming a lot of my ideas as a teenager about the world and I was very concerned about pollution and the environment and the war, this was during the Vietnam war. And all those ideas, all those themes just stayed with me through my entire adulthood. And I was really still working that stuff out, all that angst, because those issues haven't gone away.

Watch more in the clip below: