For all his ego and bravura, writer/director James Cameron is a practical man who does not take his filmmaking privilege for granted. He’s said it before in interviews, and he reiterates it again, in this new conversation with The Town podcast: “Avatar” movies cost a “metric fck-ton of money,” and in order for them to justify their existence and greenlight another sequel, they have to make a “metric fck-ton of money.”
So, if the upcoming “Avatar: Fire & Ash” doesn’t perform at the box office and make its global mint, is Cameron ready and willing to walk away from it all—especially given there are two sequels already written and planned? The answer is an adamant yes.
“Absolutely,” he told The Town emphatically and without hesitation. “I’ve been in ‘Avatar’ land for 20 years, actually 30 years, because I wrote it in 1995, but I wasn’t working continuously on it for those first ten years.”
“There was a brief flurry of interest in ’95, and then everybody said, ‘You’re out of your mind,’ and I shelved it for ten years,” he explained. “And then we got serious in 2005.”
However, to reiterate the point, if this is the end, it truly is the end. “Yeah, absolutely. Sure,” Cameron said. “If this is where it ends, cool.”
So, if it doesn’t make its money back and Disney gets cold feet? And what about the open threads of “Avatar 4” and “5”? “There is one open thread,” Cameron said about where the story goes after “Fire & Ash,” and if it ends there theatrically, “I’ll write a book,” he revealed. “I’ll answer everybody’s question[s].”
And don’t think that a baton toss is in the cards. When asked if he would pass on the “Avatar” franchise to another filmmaker, he vehemently said, “Absolutely not.”
At least not without control and some say. “Look, I have choices there,” he explained. “There are levels in which I [can] immerse. I don’t think there’d ever be a version where there’s another ‘Avatar’ movie that I didn’t produce closely.”
Cameron suggests one of the reasons he could easily let “Avatar” go if it fails financially is that he has “Ten other projects” in the pipeline. In terms of “Ghosts Of Hiroshima” being the next one that would go first in that scenario, he said not necessarily, and in fact, he may not even make it.
“That one [‘Ghosts’] just hit the headlines briefly because of the book announcement and trying to push the book to bestseller because the author is a friend of mine,” he explained.
“It doesn’t mean I’m not going to make the film, but I haven’t written the script, and it’s not slated, and I don’t even have a distribution partner on it,” he cautioned. “It’s a pretty vaporware project right now.”
“Avatar: Fire & Ash” opens nationwide December 19, 2025. Listen to the entire podcast conversation below.
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
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