Avatar: James Cameron Walks Back Plans for Another Director to Take Over

The Avatar franchise has become a global juggernaut, transporting audiences everywhere into the world of Pandora. At last weekend’s D23 Expo, fans were treated to the official title and first concept art for the upcoming third film in the franchise, which we now know is titled Avatar: Fire and Ash. Even before Fire and Ash makes its debut in theaters, there have also been some early rumblings about fourth and fifth Avatar films, and it sounds like Cameron won’t be stepping away from the franchise anytime soon. In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Cameron confirmed that he does currently plan to direct the currently-untitled Avatar sequels, instead of potentially passing them on to a new helmer.

“Sure,” Cameron revealed. “Absolutely. I mean, they’re going to have to stop me. I got plenty of energy, love doing what I’m doing. Why would I not? And they’re written, by the way. I just reread both of them about a month ago. They’re cracking stories. They’ve got to get made. Look, if I get hit by a bus and I’m in an iron lung, somebody else is going to do it.”

What Will Avatar 3 Be About?

Avatar: Fire and Ash will not only continue to the narrative of The Way of Water, but will introduce a new Na’vi clan of volcano-dwelling “Ash People.” As the cast of The Way of Water revealed to ComicBook late last year, the prospect of what could be explored in the film is really enticing. 

“It was about 2015 when I was pushing my wife who was pregnant at the time,” franchise star Sam Worthington explained. “So we were pushing around a room with all these visuals, and the visuals was of this family story mapped out over this saga of however movies. It wasn’t even movies at that point. It was just this story that Jim [Cameron] was kind of campfire telling me and her, and I’m thinking, ‘I’m about to have a kid and about to follow this kind of adventure of a family was kind of had a weird parallel symmetry.’ I think that was very exciting that if we got the opportunity to tell the whole saga, that would be great.”

“I’ve read two and three, so, I know what happens in two and three and, yeah, I can say that… Well, at the table read we had two and three, which was like, you know, basically this much. And we had, we spent two whole days reading the whole movie,” Jack Champion teased.

Avatar: Fire and Ash will be released exclusively in theaters on December 19, 2025.