James Cameron has been up to a lot, recently — in part, shooting down theories about how Titanic could have ended differently, but mostly writing the sequels to Avatar. We still have four movies to go. And despite concerns about stretching out the box-office hit too much, a five-part film series may actually be a good idea.
Despite the criticism Avatar received when it was released in 2009, many of us fell in love with the movie despite its Pocahontas-like tone (or perhaps because of it). And it certainly impressed the box office, leaving it the highest-grossing film of all time.
Avatar’s four sequels were announced in April 2016, the first tentatively scheduled for 2018, after a series of corrections — first we thought we were getting one sequel, then two, and now four.
“The storyline in the sequels really follows Jake and Neytiri and their children,” Cameron told Variety last year. “It’s more of a family saga about the struggle with the humans.”
But audiences have been left waiting since 2009, and although it’s widely known that Avatar took at least four years to make, and it was expected that a sequel would take a similar amount of time, seven years have passed with no Avatar 2. It turns out that Cameron has been tackling a lot more than only the second movie, as we discovered through his interview with The Daily Beast:
“The thing is, my focus isn’t on Avatar 2. My focus is on Avatar 2, 3, 4, and 5 equally. That’s exactly how I’m approaching it. They’ve all been developed equally. I’ve just finished the script to Avatar 5. I’m now starting the process of active prep. I’ll be working with the actors in the capture volume in August, so I’m booked in production every day between now and then. Our volume is up and running, and everything is designed, and so we’re going full-guns right now.”
Cameron seems committed to quality rather than speed, although it seems that he’s finally started pre-production.
But the idea of there being any sequel at all has long been met with derision, labeling Avatar 2 a money-grab bent on milking the most it can from the audience that pushed it to the top of the box office in 2009.
Avatar ended on a positive, triumphant note, and Avatar 2 (or 3) could do little in the context of a story that already feels finished: how much more could happen without making the story of the first movie irrelevant?
But the fact is, if there have to be sequels, more movies actually make more sense.
Related: Avatar sequels ‘many times more exciting’ than the first one, says Sigourney Weaver
Rather than a trilogy with a mediocre follow-up that creates contrived crisis only to quickly shut it all down again, possibly falling into dangerous retcons or character deaths to just push the plot along, Cameron now has the chance to set up a much more complex story.
Four more movies is enough space to develop something completely new that could, at the right pace, revive all the things we love about Pandora and the Na’vi and kick everything up a notch without making the original Avatar suffer.
Cameron himself is an outspoken climate change activist. It isn’t hard to see that Avatar itself carries heavy messages about the environment. But with questions of climate change and its legitimacy arising once more, Cameron has good reasons to bring back stories about deforestation, environmental impact, and colonization. Avatar, after all, tackled a still rather simplistic view on invasion and environmental destruction — which was possibly one of the reasons for why it is often easily dismissed as ‘Pocahontas in space.’
It would be interesting to see the new movies take on a more realistic and nuanced approach, tackling the complicated issues of poverty, corporations lobbying governments… and perhaps a new generation of mixed-race children.
Because Avatar was always about colonialism, with Pandora posing as a literal New World — a version of colonization that didn’t end as badly. The next movies will likely be war stories, maybe with corporations returning to Pandora to mine more unobtanium, and humans infiltrating the Na’vi government to breed dissension — or spread disease.
Perhaps we will see the very relevant issues of refugees, prejudice, and a desire to protect the world’s environment in a new light, with the context of the current global situation. Four films would allow the space to tackle such multifaceted issues with the necessary complexity.
But would it be possible to get all the movies done fast enough? Cameron says that he’s finished with his scripts, and it seems that he’ll be filming them back-to-back; but with the amount of time it took to get Avatar done, will the making of the next four movies take over 15 years? Will audiences wait so long?
Cameron does have one thing to his advantage: he’s widely known for bringing innovation to the film industry. Avatar was revolutionary in 2009 because of its “performance capture” technology, most of which was invented solely for the movie. By now, we’ve become used to seeing the same technology in movies like The Hobbit, and some shots of Avatar already feel rather dated.
Maybe part of the delay in making the sequels has been the development of the new, revolutionary technology that is Cameron’s signature. It would be refreshing to see what he could do next with the Na’vi and the beautiful plants and creatures of Pandora — and there’s rumors that he’s particularly interested in showing us Pandora’s underwater life. The promise of new cinematographic advancements could fill seats regardless of the film’s plot.
With over seven years between the first two Avatar films, Cameron has to deliver greatly to satisfy audiences and live up to the box office’s expectations. It may be that Avatar, with its happy ending and eco-friendly, anti-colonialism parallels is something better left in the past. But we have to trust that Cameron knows what he’s doing. This is, after all, the perfect chance to explore a more complicated Pandora — and give ourselves the environmental reminder we sorely need.
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