Remember Avatar? I do, vaguely. I remember a lot of blue guys jumping around, a giant tree and someone who looked a bit like Duke Nukem driving a robot suit. Despite being the highest grossing film of all-time (with takings of $2.8 billion), it vanished from the popular consciousness pretty quickly. Ask someone who their favorite Na’vi is these days and the best you’ll get is a funny look. But James Cameron and 20th Century Fox (and also probably Disney) are hoping that the public is hungry for more Pandora-based action, as they have a whopping four sequels in various stages of development.
Previously known merely as Avatar 2-5, BBC News is claiming to have seen documentation that gives the films specific titles. They are: Avatar: The Way of Water, Avatar: The Seed Bearer, Avatar: The Tulkun Rider and Avatar: The Quest for Eywa. I’ve got no idea whether their positions on the list correspond to which film in the series they’ll be, but the BBC is a pretty trustworthy source of news, so I’m willing to bet that these are right.
Given that Avatar 2 has long been known to have extensive underwater sequences, with Cameron explaining that Kate Winslet’s playing “a character who’s part of the Sea People, the reef people,” we can safely bet that film number two will be The Way of Water. Other than that, The Seed Bearer could be referring to the resurrection of the destroyed Tree of Souls in the first movie, The Tulkun Rider may reference the Buddhist concept of a Tulku – a reincarnated holy person trained from a young age like the Dalai Lama – and The Quest for Eywa signals a plot directly concerned with Eywa, Pandora’s nature God.
While four Avatar sequels sounds like it might be pushing it, only a fool would assume James Cameron is going to produce a series of flops. Naysayers have been writing him off since Titanic ran into a production iceberg before becoming one of the most successful films ever, a feat only equalled by his similarly mocked Avatar a decade and a half later. So, while you might not be excited now, just wait until the Cameron hype train’s done a number on you.
It was recently confirmed that filming’s wrapped on Avatar 2 and 3, which will be released on December 18th, 2020 and December 17th, 2021, respectively. 4 and 5, meanwhile, are still in production and will hit theaters in 2024 and 2025. In other words, get ready for a whole lot of blue people.