Well consider that as anyone can tell you, Avatar LOOKS really good but the story is a pretty deritive "message movie" that manages to somehow be offensive to anyone who looks at it from anything but the most shallow perspective. By this I mean indiginous peoples like Native Americans are offended and rant about being angry about the fact that the Na'vi need a white guy to save them and say that's racist. Religious groups see religious overtones they feel threatened by, saying it encourages nature worship (which it does not), and then again tons of people like me feel that it's also deeply offensive towards modern civilization and white people in general, which is ironic when you consider the people we allegedly exploited feel exactly the opposite.
In the end though the movie succeeds because it's pretty, superficial, and has lots of explosisions and action with big monsters fighting high tech military guys. It has a battle between a bloody dinosaur and a powered armor suit. Kids love that stuff, and even people who hate the message can't deny that the movie is oveflowing with a combination of beauty and pure awesome.
The thing is though that a game requires you interact with it, and arguably that the experience gets deeper than a movie. A movie can gloss over glaring holes and a shallow plot that merely maintains an illusion of depth. Games, even fast paced ones, slow things down quite a bit and can often involve questions of "why" and "what do we do".
Not to mention the fact that when dealing with a movie, people handing out the rights are VERY careful only to give the right to retread the movie, as opposed to change anything or create a sequel of sorts nowadays. Thus a game set in the aftermath would involve independant creation, and probably not what the producers of Avatar want to see happen. What's more since a lot of things aren't even explained (like why a certain mineral is so valuable exactly) all it leaves is pure garbage for a story, which becomes more obvious when you have to play with it.
In the end these basic reasons seem to have a lot to do with why most movie games blow chips, and I think it's glaringly obvious here. A movie almost totally driven by it's FX isn't as much fun to retread (which by most reports is what the game does) when for obvious reasons the images in even the best computer game aren't going to touch with what they did with that movie. All that leaves is a bunch of stereotypical "message movie" characters who might as well be cardboard cut outs, a few neat looking monsters and weapon designs, and a surrealistic alien jungle that is mostly so awesome because of the technology of the movie and the 3d and such (we've seen alien jungles before otherwise, it's not THAT unique an idea).
I think Ubisoft's big problem is that like with most game companies they have to try and predict what movies are going to be big and buy the liscence ahead of time without really knowing all of what they are going to have to deal with when the movie people finally say "okay, here is what you can work with for that liscence you bought the rights to...".
Really, I think the game industry (for all my criticisms of it) should get a brain. Coordinate like they did for the price hike, decide NOT to buy game rights for any Hollywood movies (or at least the big companies who give the movie people the huge $$$ they want). In return Hollywood will lose money they could make from the tie in, and the industry can then start demanding more rights (creative and otherwise) in making liscenced movie games.
This would be problematic of course largely because game companies that have luck playing "Russian roulette" do very well. Movie tie in games can sell very well even if they blow chips, especially things like Disney/Pixar/Childrens titles apparently. So it would involve a short term loss (a big one) for a lot of people, but in the end I'd imagine higher quality movie tie in games would result in more sales and more money in the long run. The only real "loss" would be to the paranoia of Hollywood executives.
At least that is how I see things.
