I do have to say there is some obvious good out of this. Animal Kingdom is my least favorite park, because I am not fond of the attractions there (granted I still haven't tried a couple of them) past Kilimanjaro, Festival of the Lion King, and the Nemo Musical. Avatar will bring at least a couple new attractions to the park that will get me to stay a couple hours more. As well as the later park hours. The addition of night life to Animal Kingdom will help it become more of a full day park than the half day park I have always treated it as. I do know the park has some very wonderful and beautifully done theming and attention to detail, but usually I'm with people who want to leave the park because it seems so dang hot anyway. And they aren't ones to wander or walk around unless on the way to a shop, restaurant, or another attraction. And if Avatar lends itself to anything, it is to a nighttime experience because of all the luminescent, glowing plants and such that were in the movie.
On the other hand, I get where the complainers are coming from. I saw the movie once. It was beautiful, yes. But the story sucked. And the movie did not captivate me the same way franchises such as Star Wars and Harry Potter have. Who knows how popular the movie will be in a couple years? Hopefully the sequels will give rise to the fan base of Avatar but to me it doesn't seem likely. Yet, movies like Star Wars, the last one not having been released for almost 8-10 years(?) still have huge fanbases. People love the books, comics, video games, the conventions, etc. I also don't think that Avatar really fits into Animal Kingdom. I guess it kind of does because of the whole nature conservation message and the "mythical animals/beings" thing. I know the excuse has been made that Beastly Kingdom was supposed to include dragons, which aren't real animals, but I think mythical animals such as that fit in better than weird, tall, blue people.
The thing I'm most excited for is the 'nighttime spectacular' being added. While I don't think that this is directly related to the Avatarland/brand (correct me if I'm wrong), this may have been brought on by the addition of Avatar. I think that the spectacular could have been added before without a new land needing to be added at the same time, but I guess I'll be happy to have it either way. I'm also really excited about the environment because the visuals were pretty amazing in my opinion, and I'd love to see that brought to life.
I do want to take a second to complain about the time to start it though. It's been I think 2.5 years since the announcement? I know they didn't have all the details worked out then, and I can't complain because I'm not an Imagineer, nor do I know how much time it takes to create and develop rides and do it with an outside brand that may have it's own little caveats or ideas of how things could go. But it still seems really long to me still.
Anyway, that's my disorganized ramble opinion about Avatarland. Feel free to tell me what you guys all think, and thanks for reading!
