Credit: 20th Century StudiosJames Cameron’s worry for the Avatar franchise is now over as Avatar: The Way Of Water (2022) promises to “easily” surpass expectations after hitting $1.5 Billion at the box office.
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Avatar 2 took 13 years to make and the rest of the franchise won’t take that long to make a sequel. Disney’s plan is to release an Avatar movie every other year from now on until Cameron is done with his vision. At the moment, the director plans to do five Avatar movies with Avatar 3 already done filming and Avatar 4‘s script finished.
Unlike the other movies, Cameron needed over a decade to finish Avatar 2 because he wanted to perfect the technology necessary to get his underwater visuals looking amazing. Now that he has created the technology he needs, it will only take him a fraction of the time to film and edit the next couple of movies.
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So far, the Na’vi of Pandora have been territorial, but not evil. Avatar 3 will change this up. You can expect Cameron to borrow from Avatar: The Last Airbender and create a Na’vi tribe called the Ash People who will use fire and wage war on other tribes. Fans have compared the plot details for Avatar 3 to the Fire Tribe and have accused Cameron of copying ideas.
The Hollywood Reporter shares that Cameron is looking forward to continuing the next seven years of his life focused on this franchise because there was a lot of investment in the sequel and if it flopped, then his life’s work for the past 13 years would’ve been for nothing.
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Cameron jokes that he can’t wiggle out of making the sequels now after Avatar 2‘s success:
“It looks like just with the momentum that the film has now that will easily pass our break even in the next few days, so it looks like I can’t wiggle out of this, I’m gonna have to do these other sequels.”
He then adds that he will end up talking to Disney soon about their game plan for Avatar 3 and beyond:
“I know what I’m going to be doing the next six or seven years. The point is we’re going to be okay. I’m sure that we’ll have a discussion soon with with the top folks at Disney about the game plan going forward for Avatar 3, which is already in the can – we’ve already captured and photographed the whole film so we’re in extended post-production to do all that CG magic. And then Avatar 4 and 5 are both written. We even have some of 4 in the can. We’ve begun a franchise at this point. We’ve begun a saga that can now play out over multiple films.”
It’s a very exciting time for Avatar fans as James Cameron did manage to deliver another spectacle and will have his own saga of stories about Jake Sully continue on and explore Pandora and the Na’vi in future installments. Thank goodness we only have to wait two years for the next one.
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