A strange thing happened to Avatar fans soon after the movie came out in 2009. Some of them said they were left feeling very sad.
The science-fiction epic, which is getting a sequel this week, takes place on the lush, beautiful, and made-up moon Pandora, where blue-skinned people called Na-vi live.
Watch the trailer for Avatar 2 below.
Avatar was a huge success. It made $3 billion at the box office and was nominated for nine Oscars, of which it won three.
But not long after it came out in theaters, it turned out that some fans were left sad.
A source said in 2010 that fans of the movie were sad because they wanted to go to the made-up world of Pandora but knew they could never do so.
Avatar Forums, a website for fans, had a thread called ‘Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible’ that gathered more than 1,000 posts. It was so popular that the site’s administrator, Philippe Baghdassarian, had to start a new one to keep up with the demand of sad Avatar fans.
Baghdassarian said,
I wasn’t depressed myself. In fact the movie made me happy. But I can understand why it made people depressed.
The movie was so beautiful and it showed something we don’t have here on Earth. I think people saw we could be living in a completely different world and that caused them to be depressed.
One post read,
That’s all I have been doing as of late, searching the Internet for more info about ‘Avatar.’ I guess that helps. It’s so hard I can’t force myself to think that it’s just a movie, and to get over it, that living like the Na’vi will never happen. I think I need a rebound movie.
On another fan forum, one man said they had even thought about killing themselves, writing:
Ever since I went to see ‘Avatar’ I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na’vi made me want to be one of them. I can’t stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it.
I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in Avatar.
Max Perrin, who didn’t see the movie Avatar until 2017, told a source that he and a lot of other fans felt sad after seeing it.
He said,
A lot of people have experienced this in the community. It really made me rethink a few things. I had no idea that I could be so deeply influenced by something like this. I had no idea just how deeply it was going to change me.
