Is it really true that nobody came up with an original, illustrated title for James Cameron’s insanely expensive blockbuster movie? Let’s take a look at the title itself. This is from a screen capture taken from one of the HD trailers:

It’s got a nice glow effect with some color variations within the glyphs. I think it achieves that eco-spiritual, aboriginal feel well enough. The obvious font that looks like this is Papyrus, a font found on every Windows and Mac out there. Here’s a quick and dirty copy I made in Photoshop using that ubiquitous font (without going through the work of replicating the effects):

Hmm. Not really a match. The details are clearly different. They must have set aside some of that massive budget to hire a talented typographer to give Cameron’s film an original word mark. I wonder, though, if it were just thickened up a bit with the old “faux bold” text modifier:

Closer, but still not quite. But wait… They do both have random nicks and notches in the letters to help give it them a weathered, pitted effect. A closer comparison:

Everything lines up perfectly. Well that settles it. Avatar’s font is definitely Papyrus with some path distortions done in something like Illustrator. They did at least try to fool us by making the A’s unique from one another:

Still, I can’t help but be a little disappointed at this. Oh well. Fantastic movie otherwise.