James Cameron Cutting Avatar Sequels Short?
James Cameron says if Avatar: The Way of Water underperforms at the box office, instead of going forward with Avatar 4 and 5, he may wrap things up with the third film.
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We might not get to see quite as much of Pandora as we thought. Speaking in an upcoming issue of Total Film (via Slash Film), James Cameron shares his concerns that December’s Avatar: The Way of Water will underperform at the box office, along with saying that rather than continuing with the planned Avatar 4 and 5, he’s prepared to wrap up his story in Avatar 3 if necessary. He says while he’s hopeful the sequel can turn a profit, he bluntly questions whether or not “people give a sh-t now.”
“The market could be telling us we’re done in three months, or we might be semi-done, meaning: ‘Okay, let’s complete the story within movie three, and not go on endlessly,’ if it’s just not profitable,” James Cameron said of the upcoming sequels to Avatar. “We’re in a different world now than we were when I wrote this stuff, even. It’s the one-two punch — the pandemic and streaming.”
James Cameron continued, more hopefully at first for Avatar: The Way of Water, “Or, conversely, maybe we’ll remind people what going to the theater is all about… The question is: how many people give a sh-t now?”
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard some doom and gloom from James Cameron in terms of the upcoming Avatar sequels. Back in December he talked about his worries that the “one-two punch” of streaming services and the pandemic would stop the Avatar sequels to perform as well as they need to. The problem, he said, is that Avatar: The Way of Water needs to do more than just turn a profit–it needs reach the kind of record-breaking success of features like Spider-Man: No Way Home and Top Gun: Maverick.
The first Avatar film at one point lost, and has since regained, the title of the highest grossing film of all time. “If Avatar hadn’t made so much damn money, we’d never do this — because it’s kind of crazy,” James Cameron said in December, referring to the notion of filming 4 big budget sequels back to back.
In fact, since then James Cameron has even spread some doubt on whether he’ll even direct all the remaining Avatar sequels, regardless of whether they all come out. As Slash Film points out, principal photography on Avatar 4 & 5 has yet to be completed.
As the site also notes, the performance of Avatar‘s recent re-release would seem to suggest that the sequel doesn’t have too much to worry about. In spite of a limited three week re-release, the 2009 film made $76.5 million 13 years after its premiere. That would seem to suggest more than enough anticipation for James Cameron’s second chapter in the Avatar saga.
