James Cameron shares ‘Avatar 6’ and ‘Avatar 7’ plans
Director James Cameron has revealed his plans for Avatar 6 and 7, following the first three sequels to his 2009 box office hit Avatar. The second film in the planned franchise, Avatar: The Way of the Water, is due this month, with a third film scheduled for release in 2024. Subsequent sequels are scheduled to be released in 2026 and in 2028.
Filming for Avatar 3 has been well underway, with some parts of Avatar 4 also being filmed. However, the director shared how the franchise could end with the third film if Avatar: The Way of the Water underperforms at the box office. “The market could be telling us we’re done in three months, or we might be semi-done,” Cameron told Entertainment Weekly. “Meaning: ‘OK, let’s complete the story within movie three, and not go on endlessly,’ if it’s just not profitable.”
Despite this, Cameron recently revealed in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that he plans to stretch the Avatar franchise out to 2030 releases. “I’d be 89 by then,” Cameron jokes, but this seems plausible when he considers that it took him 25 years to make the first two Avatar movies. “Obviously, I’m not going to be able to make Avatar movies indefinitely, the amount of energy required.” He has begun planning for the future: “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.”
In the same interview, Cameron addressed claims that the first Avatar film has minimal to no cultural imprint, despite exhibiting revolutionary technology and being the highest-grossing movie of all time. “There’s scepticism in the marketplace around, ‘Oh, did it ever make any real cultural impact?'” he recounts the claims. “Can anybody even remember the characters’ names?” alluding to online claims that audiences remember Avatar‘s visual advancements but not the names or motivations of its central characters.
“When you have extraordinary success, you come back within the next three years,” Cameron shares. “That’s just how the industry works. You come back to the well, and you build that cultural impact over time. Marvel had maybe 26 movies to build out a universe, with the characters cross-pollinating. So it’s an irrelevant argument. We’ll see what happens after this film.”
Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of the Water will be released Friday, December 16th. Watch the trailer below.
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