James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water has been a big hit with audiences as it’s already crossed a billion dollars at the box office. It looks like 20th Century Studios and Disney are going to greenlight Cameron’s future sequels with numbers like this because those were the kind of numbers that everyone was hoping for.
Cameron already has Avatar 3 ready to go and it will be released on December 20th, 2024. After that, the pace of the release of the films is going to slow down a bit. During a recent interview with The Wrap, the director said:
“They exist. These stories exist. We know exactly what we’re doing. We know what these movies are gonna be. We just have to go through the process of getting them done. So, you know ideally two years from now, [Avatar] 3 comes out. Ideally maybe 3 years after that 4 comes out and then ideally maybe a couple years after that 5 comes out. So we won’t be away from the market place, so we’ll have that sense of a persistent world and ongoing story that I think people want. If they’re going to invest in these characters, they’re going to invest in this world, we want to give it to them in a regular cadence, ideally, and that was the game plan. That’s one of the reasons we were gone so long.”
I like that Cameron isn’t looking to rush these movies out year after year, that he’s actually going to take time to develop them properly and make sure they are top-notch movie-going experiences before they are released in theaters. It will take longer for the others to make because parts 4 and 5 haven’t completed shooting yet and there’s still a long way to go with those sequels. With Avatar 2 and 3, they shot back-to-back. Cameron said:
“We mixed the schedules for 2 and 3 together, based on the types of scenes and the environments. I said, let’s just treat it like it’s a six-hour miniseries and we’re only going to go to Frankfurt once. We’re going to shoot all the scenes from 2 and 3 at the same time. That was more or less the motif. Actor availability was an issue as well. Anything that had to be done with a specific actor, we did all the scenes for 2 and 3 together — and a little bit of 4. Because once again, I had to shoot the kids out. They’re allowed to age six years in the middle of the story on page 25 of movie 4. So I needed everything before then, and then everything after, we’ll do later.”
The film is set more than a decade after the events of the first film, “Avatar: The Way of Water begins to tell the story of the Sully family (Jake, Neytiri, and their kids), the trouble that follows them, the lengths they go to keep each other safe, the battles they fight to stay alive, and the tragedies they endure.”
The movie stars Zoe Saldana, Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Cliff Curtis, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Edie Falco, Jemaine Clement, and Kate Winslet.
I was really happy with how Avatar: The Way of Water turned out and I’m excited to see how the rest of this story plays out!