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Avatar: The Way of Water comes to theaters on December 16, with a third Avatar film–which has already been filmed–penciled in for 2024. A fourth movie could follow in 2026 if the series proves to be successful, and now writer-director James Cameron has shared some information on Part 4.
He told Collider that while he cannot get into specifics, Avatar 4–or whatever official title it ends up receiving–is a film that “goes nuts in a good way.” A studio executive who read Cameron’s script for Avatar told him in an email, “Holy f**k.”
“I can’t tell you the details, but all I can say is that when I turned in the script for 2, the studio gave me three pages of notes. And when I turned in the script for 3, they gave me a page of notes, so I was getting better. When I turned in the script for 4, the studio executive, creative executive over the films wrote me an email that said, ‘Holy f**k.’ And I said, ‘Well, where are the notes?’ And she said, ‘Those are the notes.’ Because it kind of goes nuts in a good way, right?”
Cameron previously described Avatar 4 as a “corker” and a “motherfu**er.” Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 were filmed back-to-back, but whether or not Avatar 4 gets made will depend on if those movies are financially successful. Even if they are, Cameron has said he might step back and let someone else direct the planned Avatar 4 and Avatar 5.
In the Collider interview, Cameron said he modeled his Avatar series after Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings in that Jackson mapped out where he wanted the films to go from the beginning. This way, Jackson could communicate to the actors what their character arcs would be long-term.
“So I felt I had to do the same thing. I had to play this as if the books already existed. So the only way for us to do that was to write all the scripts and let the actors read all the scripts and see where their characters were going and what it all meant,” Cameron said. “Not that that’s actable in the moment, but I think it’s something that the actors could work into their preparation for their characters.”
2009’s Avatar is the highest-grossing movie in history, so The Way of Water has very big shoes to fill. Whether or not the sequel can match or exceed the original’s box office figures remains to be seen, but early box office tracking estimates paint a positive picture. The Way of Water is expected to make $170 million or more in the US alone for its first weekend, which would be up significantly from the $77 million that the original Avatar made in the US for its opening weekend in 2009.
Cameron has said The Way of Water needs to make around $1 billion to turn a profit. He has also said The Way of Water is a very bad business decision.
The Way of Water had its premiere in London this week, and the first reactions to the movie were overwhelmingly positive. People who saw the movie called it “vastly superior” to the first movie and “breathtaking” in terms of its visuals.
