Avatar 2 Will Take Place on Pandora and Earth, James Cameron Confirms

James Cameron has confirmed Avatar 2 will return to Pandora and visit Earth. Cameron has been busy filming the upcoming Avatar sequels and hoping that the first sequel does well enough to guarantee the ones to follow. Cameron is filming Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 simultaneously and is hoping that those two do well enough at the box office for Disney to greenlight Avatar 4 and Avatar 5. Speaking to Dune director Denis Villeneuve for Variety, Cameron revealed a bit about his Avatar 2 plans and what it means to commit to a single series for as long as it takes to film four movies back to back. 

"Well, it was a challenging decision because I either wanted to do it right, or just not even do it," Cameron says. "I just made this – I guess, strange – decision that everything that I needed to say artistically about the things that were important to me, I could say within the framework of the universe that I knew it could be. Just like Dune takes place across worlds, the later Avatar's take place across...certainly across two worlds, because some of it takes place on Earth as the story evolves, and different biomes within."

In the same interview, Cameron confirmed that "2 is fully in the can. We have a working cut that we're filling in the visual effects within. I feel pretty confident with that film. 3 is still a bit shadowy. It's way too long. I haven't really turned my energy into a disciplined cutting process on that yet. But I know I've got the performances. That's the important thing. I've done all the capture. I've done most of the live-action shooting. I still owe a little bit on some of the adult characters. We were more concerned with the kids aging out."

He continued, "We mixed the schedules for 2 and 3 together, based on the types of scenes and the environments. I said, let's just treat it like it's a six-hour miniseries and we're only going to go to Frankfurt once. We're going to shoot all the scenes from 2 and 3 at the same time. That was more or less the motif. Actor availability was an issue as well. Anything that had to be done with a specific actor, we did all the scenes for 2 and 3 together — and a little bit of 4. Because once again, I had to shoot the kids out. They're allowed to age six years in the middle of the story on page 25 of movie 4. So I needed everything before then, and then everything after, we'll do later.'

What do you think? Let us know in the comments. Avatar 2 opens in theaters on December 16th, 2022.