‘Avatar 4’ is Still Happening—But James Cameron Might Sit it Out

For all of the claims that nobody really remembers (or cares about) the Avatar movies, the receipts suggest otherwise. The original Avatar, despite being a sci-fi Dances with Wolves featuring a cast of freaky blue alien hippies who have sex with their hair, is still the highest-grossing film of all time, returning to the top spot by way of a 2021 China re-release after being briefly displaced by Avengers: Endgame. The first sequel, The Way of Water took 13 years to arrive, and did a cool $2.3 billion when it did. Three years later, Fire and Ash took in $1.49 billion. Clearly a decline, but crazy cash by any blockbuster standard.Even so, it was enough of a drop that there is seemingly some uncertainty as to where the series is headed—or if it'll continue at all. As it stands, two more sequels remain on the docket, as has been the roadmap for years: Avatar 4 and 5, set for release in December 2029 and December 2031, respectively. But word out of Pandora has been relatively quiet since Fire and Ash, with production on either sequel—meant to film back-to-back, as happened with 2 and 3—yet to fully kick into gear, though 4 has already been partially shot.So, are they hitting pause on Pandora? Do we have no more time for the Na'vi? Is Sam Worthington gonna have to find a new job?Even by modern blockbuster standards, the Avatar films are huge—and extremely resource-intensive—technical undertakings that take a load of time and money to prepare, shoot, and finalize. During the press tour for Fire and Ash, director James Cameron emphasized that Avatar's future relied upon that film doing the sort of business that would justify continuation, joking that he'd “hold a press conference” to reveal how the story would've played out if they decided to end the series early. You'd think a billion-and-a-half dollars would be more than enough, but these are damn expensive movies. Especially given their undersized cultural footprint.Further, the filmmaker himself has publicly ummed and ahhed as to whether he'll helm 4 and 5. “The Avatar films themselves are kind of all-consuming,” said Cameron in a 2022 interview with Empire. “I think eventually over time […] I'll want to pass the baton to a director that I trust to take over. […] Or maybe not. I don't know.” As recently as August, he suggested that he's thinking about what “other stories [he wants] to tell,” given he has been almost entirely immersed in the world of Avatar since 2009. “How many of them do I need to direct myself, versus writing and/or producing and working with other filmmakers?”That said, it's not as though the series has completely dropped out of his mind. In May, he told the Empire Film Podcast that he was working on ways to make the next Avatar movies significantly more affordable and less time-consuming, reinforcing that they were “still floating out there” in development. “We're going to be looking at some new technologies and try to do them more efficiently,” he said. “Because they're hideously expensive and take a long time. I want to do them in half the time for two-thirds the cost.” He estimated that it would take them “a year or so” to work out the logistics.Another significant update came by way of an interview with Inverse the month prior, with series producer Rae Sanchini suggesting that Team Avatar were “full speed ahead” on the coming sequels. “Right now, we're figuring out the schedule,” she said. “We're working hard on it right now, budgeting, scheduling, building out our new pipeline for them.” Sanchini also called the scripts “brilliant,” and doubled down that the films would still be made: “As far as I'm concerned, we're heading forward.”As to what might happen in the sequels—should they actually move ahead—plot specifics have been kept under wraps. We know that there'll be a significant time jump, upwards of 6 years. And in 2023, long-time Cameron collaborator and series producer Jon Landau told Empire magazine that the fourth movie would visit earth for the first time. “There's overpopulation and a depletion of our natural resources that make life harder,” he said. “But we don't want to paint a bleak picture for where our world is going. The films are also about the idea that we can change course.”This story originally appeared in British GQ.