The making of Cirque Du Soleil’s Avatar-inspired show Toruk – The First Flight

We first encountered the far away planet of Pandora in James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar. Strangely, despite the film becoming, and remaining, the highest-grossing movie of all time till date, we’ve so far been spared the sequels and “universe building”, unlike other smash hit franchises such as Star Wars, Marvel Superheroes or even The Matrix.

This wasn’t always the plan. Cameron announced two sequels back in 2010, with the first initially scheduled to release in 2014. The addition of a further two sequels, however, along with the need to develop brand new technology to allow the oft-ground-breaking Cameron to shoot motion caption scenes underwater for the first time ever, pushed the release back, with the first sequel now tentatively pencilled in for a December 2020 release.
he stage show is set 3,000 years before the events of Cameron’s first film, and tells the story of two teenage Na’vi (the giant blue aliens from the film) tribesmen who set out on a daring mission to tame the fearsome Toruk – a giant pterodactyl-like bird – in order to save the Tree of Souls, which is a vital part of Na’vi culture.

Of course, when you attend a Cirque du Soleil production, the story is secondary to the sheer spectacle of the event, and Toruk promises plentiful projections, light shows, giant puppets and kites, circus skills, stagecraft and a pumping musical score.

The show does seek to establish itself firmly within the universe of the movie – James Cameron himself was a member of the original creative team – however, it’s only natural that a stage show is unable to create a world identical to that on the big screen. The 3,000-year time lapse perhaps helps here as we are seeing Pandora long before the events of the movie, and also one humans haven’t yet discovered, which eliminates the need to somehow have the nine-foot-tall Na’vi performing while towering over human characters.