James Cameron has never been accused of thinking small. But even for the filmmaker behind “Avatar,” the scope of his sequels was so large that it originally collapsed under its own weight. Appearing on the CrewCall podcast, Cameron revealed that “Avatar: The Way of Water” and this December’s upcoming “Avatar: Fire & Ash” were initially designed as one mammoth follow-up to the 2009 original.
“Two and three used to be one movie,” he admitted. “We just tried to pack it all into one movie. It never worked. So I unzipped it into two separate films. So really they complete a story arc.”
That arc, he explained, centers on the Sully family, whose journey across Pandora has driven the narrative since Jake and Neytiri first met. “The end of three brings you to the end of a story arc for the Sully family,” Cameron said. “A whole new arc starts in four and five.”
It’s a telling distinction for a director who has long built his blockbusters around cliffhanger tension and serialized stakes. But Cameron insists audiences won’t feel shortchanged when “Fire & Ash” arrives. “The one thing I can promise with this film is there’s a real sense of culmination. It’s not just a cliffhanger, you know, with a kind of bleeding stump of a movie. It’s not Han Solo in Carbonite, you know what I mean? And you’ve got to tune back in. If I do get to make 4 and 5, that becomes one new kind of epic story.”
That next arc, if greenlit, won’t just expand Pandora — it will finally leave it. “We will see Earth,” Cameron confirmed, describing how the fifth installment would confront humanity’s ruinous impact on the planet. “I did want to see what is the consequence of us running rampant on this beautiful planet that we’re on right now. What does the consequence of that look like 200 years out? And it’s not pretty.”
Still, Cameron isn’t planning too far ahead without covering his bases. He revealed that his team has already shot a portion of “Avatar 4” for purely practical reasons. “We shot a small portion of four because our kids would have aged out of their characters. And then there was a big time jump in the first act of movie four. So we shot that sort of defensively.”
For Cameron, who has been crafting Pandora for nearly two decades, the split between 2 and 3 was less a compromise than a necessity to tell the story properly. It also allows him to clearly draw a line between one saga and the next. “Two and three complete the Sully story. Four and five, if I get to make them, become their own epic story. That was always the plan once I realized it couldn’t all fit in one movie.”
With “Avatar: Fire & Ash” landing in theaters this December, fans will soon find out what culmination Cameron has in mind — and whether the series has the momentum to carry into its boldest chapters yet, reaching Earth for the very first time.
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
