With ‘Avatar’ having been released ten years ago, some might be wondering how James Cameron has been spending his time putting together four sequels to the ex-biggest blockbuster of all time. While I feel that no one is expecting any of them to achieve the same level of performance at the box office when they drop on 2021, 2023, 2025, and 2027, they will still likely all make quite a splash. However, aside from working as the executive producer on ‘Alita: Battle Angel‘ and ‘Terminator: Dark Fate,’ you haven’t seen his name popping up all that often.
Well, shooting four films back to back and preparing for that endeavor is quite an intense experience and use of time, according to James Cameron.
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Cameron shared the following in a recent Variety interview on the 10th anniversary of the original film.
“People don’t really understand the scope and complexity of the process. It’s like making two and a half big animated films. A typical big animated film takes about four years, so, if you do the math on that, we’re kind of right on schedule for December 2021.”
He went on to try and clarify the “two and a half big animated films” comment:
“From 2013 until now we’ve mostly designed the whole world across four new movies. We’ve written, finished scripts for all four of those films. We’ve cast them, and we’ve [performance] captured movie two, movie three, and the first part of movie four. We’re mostly done with the live-action. I’ve got a couple of months in New Zealand in spring, so we’re kind of on track with what we set out to do.”
With how much time the actors, writers, and director have put into this franchise, one can only hope that, for their sake, they all end up being box office darlings.
Do you think that plotting out all of the following ‘Avatar’ movies in detail was the right choice for James Cameron to do? Will filming it this way deliver a better story, or will the budget for expanding the world of Pandora sink the franchise before it can even get the first sequel into theaters? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
‘Avatar 2′ is scheduled for release on December 17, 2021, with ‘Avatar 3’ arriving on December 22, 2023, ‘Avatar 4’ on December 19, 2025, and ‘Avatar 5’ on December 17, 2027, but as Cameron has stated before, “Let’s face it, if ‘Avatar 2’ and ‘3’ don’t make enough money, there’s not going to be a ‘4’ and ‘5’.”
