When it comes to film franchises, there are some filmmakers who have more ambitious plans than others. While some believe the gamble of New Line Cinema on Peter Jackson directing all threeLord of the Ringsmovies back to back based on his previous work and without any idea whether audiences would get on board any of it is still one of the biggest gambles in Hollywood history, James Cameron is looking to defy all logic with his four plannedAvatarsequels being written before he even completes the first of them.
We have been promised a sequel to Cameron’s massively successfulAvatarsince that film was released in 2009, with theTitanicandTerminatormastermind setting out some ludicrously ambitious plans of where he wanted to take the franchise. However, after 12 years we are only now on track to see the first of his sequels and the real question is with so much time having passed, is there the same appetite forAvataras when it brought itsthen-groundbreaking visualsto theaters and became the biggest movie of all time?
Producer Jon Landau spoke toTotal Filmmagazine about the upcoming sequels and explained the main reason why it has taken over a decade to bring the first one to screens. As he revealed, the fact that all four sequel scripts have been written, at least in part, was a major delaying point for getting any newAvatarcontent out.
“The scripts are the blueprint from which we work. So a large portion of our time was writing… with the challenge that each of those four scripts had to individually resolve itself in a story that concludes with a big emotional resolution – but when you look at them as a whole, the connected story arc of all four movies creates an even larger epic saga.”
When it comes toAvatar 2, the film will pick up with exactly the same time difference having passed as in the real world. Cameron will be once again directing and the story will see the Sully family as they are now, with Sam Worthington’s Jake and Zoe Saldana’s Neytiri having become parents since we last saw them.
Landau went on to explain, “I think the story ofAvatar 2, and the strength of the story, is whatJim [Cameron]always does in any of his movies: he writes in universal themes that are bigger than any one genre. And if you think about this, there’s really no more universal theme than family. At the center of each of our sequels is the Sully family. What are the dynamics that parents go through to protect their family?”
The plot of the film sees the RDA mining operation return to Pandora, disrupting the Sullys' content lives, with Jake moving his family to the reef where he believes they will be safe. Landau said, “And when you get to the reef, there’s a clan we call the Metkayina. The Sullys are no longer in the environment that they know, the rainforest. They become the fish out of water. They become the fish out of water both culturally and just environmentally."
Avatar 2has a release date of December 16th, 2022, when we will discover ifthe very long waithas been worth it for a return to Pandora.
