‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ almost featured a massive space battle

Avatar: The Way of Water has now been in theaters for a month, and is continuing to clean up at the box office. It’s currently the seventh highest-grossing movie of all time and is preparing to dethrone Spider-Man: No Way Home and Avengers: Infinity War, all of which makes those who made grim predictions of a colossal box office bomb look rather foolish.

The Way of Water came 13 years after Avatar and went through a protracted development, with James Cameron figuring out a multi-film arc, pioneering new technologies, and essentially making multiple sequels at the same time. As such, there’s a lot left on the cutting room floor.

At some point in the future, we’ll hopefully get a full rundown of the alternative Avatar sequels that might have been, but right now we have a peek at a crazy-sounding sequence that would have taken the Na’vi into space as revealed to Entertainment Weekly‘s by writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver.

“There was one idea of a space battle with Navi. That idea got a lot of traction, and we talked a lot about it. We were struggling, though. How would that work with the story that we’re telling? Jim said, ‘Well, give me a few weeks.’ He went off and he wrote an entire script. And, by the way, a brilliant script.”

We want to read it! But, as you might predict, this proved difficult to work into The Way of Water‘s story as Jaffa admitted.

“At the end of the day, the whole script got thrown out because it just didn’t really work with the story we were telling,”

Elements of this scrapped idea did end up in the comic book Avatar: The High Ground, which fills in the years between the end of Avatar and the beginning of The Way of Water. This sees Jake and Neytiri take a shuttle to space to try and negotiate peace with humans but get into an interstellar conflict (and is apparently fully canon). Even so, we’d have loved to see it play out on the biggest screen possible.

With Avatar 3 set to visit the “Ash People” – a fire tribe of Na’vi – it seems unlikely we’re getting our space battle anytime soon. Perhaps by the time of Avatar 5 we’ll see this come to pass, as The Way of Water is teasing a war with the humans that’ll go way beyond the skirmishes we’ve seen so far.

Avatar: The Way of Water is still in theaters.