Avatar's Zoe Saldana Has Hilarious Reaction to Latest Delays

The long delay for the release of Avatar 5 has garnered a hilarious reaction from star Zoe Saldaña. Disney shuffled its release future release dates for several projects, including those found under the Marvel, Star Wars, and Avatar banners. As a possible reaction to the current writers' strike, Disney set new release dates for Avatar 3, Avatar 4, and Avatar 5. It's the latter date that raises the most eyebrows, however, with Disney slating it for December 19, 2031. This would be 22 years after the premiere of the original Avatar back in 2009. This didn't go unnoticed by Saldaña, who had a clever joke about how old she'd be reprising her role as Neytiri when Avatar 5 comes out.

"Great! I'm gonna be 53 when the last Avatar movie comes out," Zoe Saldaña wrote in a post to her Instagram Stories alongside a photo of Neytiri. "I was 27 when I shot the very first Avatar movie. The Guardians of the Galaxy star isn't the only person involved in Avatar 5 that will be up in age. For example, her co-star Sam Worthington will be 55 years old, and director James Cameron will be 77 years old.

Avatar 3 was originally set for a 2024 release, with Disney scheduling each of the remaining three films two years apart. Avatar 3 will now bow on December 19, 2025, followed by Avatar 4 on December 21, 2029.

Avatar 3 Behind-the-Scenes Photo Revealed

Avatar producer Jon Landau revealed a new behind-the-scenes photo in response to the delays to the franchise's next three films.

"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," 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 Saldaña, 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 the two husbands and the two wives," Rick Jaffa, who co-wrote the threequel with Amanda Silver, teased about the threequel. "There are a lot of dynamics 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 incredibly inflated scales of different worlds," Silver added. "The clans that you'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 a revelation for this movie, there's lots more of that stuff to come. It's incredibly exciting, the story that happens to the Sullys. You couldn't predict it."