Given that it’s taken 13 years for the second installment to arrive, and there are still a further three sequels to go after that, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect James Cameron to be spending the rest of his career on Pandora dealing solely with the Avatar franchise.
The game-changing filmmaker has helmed precisely two features in the last 25 years, and while he’s been keeping himself plenty busy in the interim with his various outside interests, fans long for the days when the brains behind Aliens, Terminator, and True Lies used to crank them out on a semi-regular basis.
To that end, Cameron somewhat surprisingly revealed to Empire that due to how time-consuming and all-encompassing Avatar has become, he may end up handing over the reigns to somebody else for the fourth and fifth films.
“The Avatar films themselves are kind of all-consuming. I’ve got some other things I’m developing as well that are exciting. I think eventually over time – I don’t know if that’s after three or after four – I’ll want to pass the baton to a director that I trust to take over, so I can go do some other stuff that I’m also interested in. Or maybe not. I don’t know.”
Robert Rodriguez ended up directing Alita; Battle Angel with Cameron as co-writer and producer after the latter had been developing the blockbuster sci-fi for over a decade, so he’s got previous in someone else taking over his babies. Whether it happens or not remains to be seen, but it’ll be a long time before we find out.
