James Cameron has been working for the better part of ten years on a whole batch of Avatar sequels. The first, The Way of Water, finally opens in theaters — almost a decade after it was first announced — in a couple of weeks. After that, Cameron intends to make two three more Avatar sequels. The third film has already been shot, and some of the fourth has as well. There’s already a script written for the fifth. (The whole saga was written together.)
Whether Cameron makes them all these Avatars depend on how the movies perform at the box office. If audiences keep returning to Pandora, he’ll keep making them. And, if interest remains high through Avatar 5, that doesn’t necessarily have to be the end either.
In a new Cameron profile in The Hollywood Reporter, he reveals that he’s got “plans” for an Avatar 6 and 7 too. Of course, Cameron is 68 years old, and at the pace he’s on, he would be getting up there in years by the time the franchise could even theoretically make a sixth film. So he says if he did get to keep making them, he would likely need to find someone to replace him as the series’ director. As he put it:
Obviously, I’m not going to be able to make Avatar movies indefinitely, the amount of energy required … I would have to train somebody how to do this because, I don’t care how smart you are as a director, you don’t know how to do this.
Cameron also told THR he thinks he might have “five or six more movies in him” at this stage of his career, and three of them would be Avatars. But since the Avatars are supposed to keep him busy through at least 2028, any films from Cameron set on any planet besides Pandora could be a long ways off.
Avatar: The Way of Water opens in theaters everywhere on December 16.
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