Avatar 2 is still on the way, and director James Cameron is reminding fans of that fact by dropping a new photo with his Avatar leading man, Sam Worthington. The new photo (which appears in Total Film Magazine) shows Cameron looking contemplative while behind the scenes of production on the Avatar sequel; Worthington is right there with him, grinning away in a motion-capture suit with facial-capture dots freckled all over his face. Based on the small number of practical props in the photo, we can see that Worthington’s character, Jake Sully, will be doing some Na’vi-style archery in this scene!
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If you are wondering what has taken the Avatar franchise so long to release the follow-up to the Oscar-winning billion-dollar film phenomenon from 2009, the answer is simple: James Cameron’s limitless ambition. Cameron has developed new techniques for filming and/or creating underwater sequences as part of Avatar 2’s storyline. He also planned not one, two, or three, but four Avatar sequels to make in one big run, for release in alternating years with Disney’s Star Wars films. Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic shook up everything about that production schedule, but Avatar 2 is still set for 2022.
“The scripts are the blueprint from which we work,” producer Jon Landau told Total Film magazine. “So a large portion of our time was writing… with the challenge that each of those four scripts had to individually resolve itself in a story that concludes with a big emotional resolution – but when you look at them as a whole, the connected story arc of all four movies creates an even larger epic saga.”
Landau previously told Total Film that Avatar 2’s story starts more than a decade after the original film, keeping things in real-time. Sam Worthington‘s Sully and Zoe Saldana’s Neytiri are parents raising their own family. Their lives are upended when RDA mining operations return to Pandora, forcing them on the run.
“And when you get to the reef, there’s a clan we call the Metkayina,” Landau explained. “The Sullys are no longer in the environment they know, the rainforest. They become the fish out of water. They become the fish out of water both culturally and just environmentally.”
“I think the story of Avatar 2, and the strength of the story, is what Jim [Cameron] always does in any of his movies: he writes in universal themes that are bigger than any one genre,” Landau concludes. “And if you think about this, there’s really no more universal theme than family. At the center of each of our sequels is the Sully family. What are the dynamics that parents go through to protect their family?”
Avatar 2 will hit theaters in 2022.
