James Cameron will be returning to the world of Pandora later than scheduled. On Tuesday, Disney’s 20th Century Studios delayed the next three Avatar sequels: the untitled Avatar 3 moved from December 20th, 2024, to December 19th, 2025; Avatar 4 moved from December 18th, 2026, to December 21st, 2029; and the fifth and final installment, Avatar 5, moved from December 22nd, 2028, to December 19th, 2031. (Disney also reshuffled its Marvel Studios slate and dated the live-action Moana for 2025 and a new Star Wars movie for December 18th, 2026, taking Avatar 4‘s vacated release date.)
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“Each Avatar film is an exciting but epic undertaking that takes time to bring to the quality level we as filmmakers strive for and audiences have come to expect,” franchise producer Jon Landau tweeted alongside a new image. “The team is hard at work and can’t wait to bring audiences back to Pandora in December 2025.”
Cameron shot 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water and Avatar 3 in September 2017. In November 2018, Cameron announced he wrapped filming with the principal cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, and Kate Winslet. Michelle Yeoh (Everything Everywhere All at Once, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts) and David Thewlis (the Harry Potter franchise) are among the new additions to the cast.
Plot details remain under wraps, but Avatar 3 will explore the dynamics between Sully (Worthington) and Neytiri (Saldana), and Ronal (Winslet) and Tonowari (Cliff Curtis).
“There’s a lot going on between husbands and wives and between thetwo husbands and the two wives,” Rick Jaffa, who co-wrote the threequel with Amanda Silver, teased about the threequel. “There are a lot ofdynamics set up that continue to play out.”
“You have this kind of deeply relatable series of dynamics,inter-family, interpersonal, inter-clan, played out on these incrediblyinflated scales of different worlds,” Silver added. “The clans thatyou’re going to meet and the worlds that you’re going to find on Pandora— you can’t even imagine what they are. Just like the tulkun were arevelation for this movie, there’s lots more of that stuff to come. It’sincredibly exciting, the story that happens to the Sullys. You couldn’tpredict it.”
Avatar 3 is now scheduled to open in theaters on December 19th, 2025.
