Avatar 4 Star Says Filming Restarts Soon

Avatar 4 is set to start filming sooner than expected. Sam Worthington told PEOPLE that one month from now, the movie will be back to work. It’s no surprise that James Cameron wants to get cracking on future entries after the success of Avatar: The Way of Water. He’s actually been tucking away footage for the third entry in the franchise where he can. Worthington said, “We go back to work on it in a month and it’s big. It’s bigger than you can imagine.” That should hype people who were enamored with the scale of the second Avatar movie. However, that release date for Avatar 3 is still a very big ways off. 

A few weeks ago, Cameron also spoke to PEOPLE about how the third Avatar movie was progressing. He said that the project was “right on track.” Obviously, because of the actors and writers strikes, production had to pause over the summer. That little break moved the release date for Avatar 3 all the way to December 19 2025. (That’s basically an entire year from the proposed December 2024 release date the project previously held.) However, if the Avatar franchise has taught observers one thing, its that audiences will wait for these movies. People came out in droves to see Avatar: The Way of Water in droves and that’s unlikely to change next time out.

Avatar 4 Is Truly Wild

According to Director James Cameron, avatar for a set to be truly wild. When approaching the executives at 20th Century Studios, the beloved filmmaker delivered his vision for the sequel. After a spirited “Holy f***” from the executive present, the plan for the movie marched forward. Collider asked Cameron about the plans for another trip to Pandora. Fans have been waiting in suspense for a while now and Avatar 3 isn’t even scheduled to release until deep in 2025.

“I can’t tell you the details, but all I can say is that when I turned in the script for 2, the studio gave me three pages of notes,” Cameron told the outlet. “And when I turned in the script for 3, they gave me a page of notes, so I was getting better. When I turned in the script for 4, the studio executive, creative executive over the films wrote me an email that said, ‘Holy f-ck.’ And I said, ‘Well, where are the notes?’ And she said, ‘Those are the notes.’ Because it kind of goes nuts in a good way, right?”

So Much of Avatar Is In Production

Avatar‘s big franchise plans continue to move forward at a wild clip. Cameron told Variety that parts of 3 have already been shot. So, the filmmaker is getting the lead out when it comes to moving the story of Jake Sully and his family forward. Will this apply to the fourth entry? It sure seems like it.

“2 is fully in the can,” Cameron revealed at the time. “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.”

“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,” he would add. “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.’

When do you think we’ll get Avatar 4? Let us know down in the comments!