The mystery surrounding future titles of the Avatar sequels may have been solved by the BBC.
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In a report to open November, the site reported that it has uncovered documents which may tie the projects to the names, Avatar: The Way of Water, Avatar: The Seed Bearer, Avatar: The Tulkun Rider and Avatar: The Quest for Eywa.
The movies had previously just been referenced as Avatar 2, Avatar 3, Avatar 4, and Avatar 5, however the sequels were never going to stick with those names, at least according to James Cameron.
“Certainly I don’t want to call it Avatar 2,” Cameron said at the Visual Effects Society Awards ceremony in 2012. “(Jake) is not an avatar anymore, is he? Maybe we’ll call it Na’vi.”
With the success of the first film, it appears as an obvious decision to at least keep Avatar in the names of the upcoming projects which are set to be released in December 2020, December 2021, December 2024, and December 2025.
Cameron had also previously told Collider.com that there would be a lot of water involved in the second and third movies, which would indicate that the BBC report may have more validity to it.
“There’s a tremendous amount of water work across Avatar 2and 3,” he said in 2017. “It’s ongoing into 4 and 5, but the emphasis is on 2 and 3.
“We actually played an entire scene underwater with our young cast. We’ve got six teenagers and one seven-year-old, and they’re all playing a scene underwater. We’ve been training them for six months now, with how to hold their breath, and they’re all up in the two to four minute range. They’re all perfectly capable of acting underwater, very calmly while holding their breath. We’re not doing any of this on scuba. And we’re getting really good data, beautiful character motion and great facial performance capture. We’ve basically cracked the code.”
According to star Sigourney Weaver the first two of the four planned Avatar sequels have wrapped filming.
During a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, she was asked about her role, which will see her taking on a different character than she played in the first movie.
She won’t be switching characters between each and every film, though. This new role will stay the same throughout all of the sequels.
“It’s a continuous character,” Weaver said. “We just finished shooting two and three. We shot it in LA and James has announced publicly that there’s a lot of underwater work, so we learned how to free dive and we did many scenes underwater which was challenging and kind of cool.
“I’m so lucky because I always grew up near the water and I’m married to someone from Hawaii and I had learned to swim. Also, you have the best safety divers in the world. The one scary thing is sometimes you have to be weighted down to be on the bottom. Luckily, I would have a safety diver on each arm to get me back to the surface. I was grateful for that, because otherwise I would still be there.”
The first Avatar movie was released in 2009 and remains the highest grossing film of all time with a $2.8 billion box office take.
