James Cameron’s Avatar was a shock to the cinematic system when it was released in 2009, opening modestly but continuing to make solid money for weeks and months until it became the highest-grossing film of all time. More than a decade later, Avatar: The Way of Water finally landed in theaters last year, and nearly did it again, earning over $2 billion, and making Cameron the director of three of the four highest grossing movies ever (Avatar at #1, Avatar 2 at #3, and Titanic at #4). In an interview on the red carpet at this weekend’s Saturn Awards, the filmmaker teased that the upcoming third installment in the franchise will be “a tougher ride” than The Way of Water, and will present totally new challenges to the characters.
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Cameron, on hand to accept awards for Best Science Fiction Film, Direction, Screenwriting and Visual Effects at the genre-friendly awards show, told interviewers that he was happy to keep playing in the Avatar universe for a while. Asked to tease the third movie, he gave vague — but intriguing — sound bytes.
“It’s just a continuation of the epic,” Cameron told Mama’s Geeky. “You’ll see new environments, new characters. The characters that you know and love will be challenged even more, and go through some trials and tribulations. I think it’s going to be a tougher ride than A2, in a good way.”
You can see the clip below.
We won’t be waiting a decade for this sequel — they shot the second and third movies back to back — but Cameron explained in the interview that the process…well, it isn’t quick and easy. It’s actually a really bespoke process that involves building tools that operate to his exacting standards, and then using them over a course of years.
“We spent about eight years developing the tools,” Cameron explained. “We released the first Avatar in 2009, it played into 2010, we got busy. We didn’t start shooting the second and third film together until September of 2017, and that intervening time period was creating a whole new tool set to do water, to do the characters, with 100% accuracy to the emotion, the performance of the actors, so it was quite a technical development, and then it’s just a long, painstaking process. The capture itself goes fairly normally, like about at the pace of a normal movie, and then after that there’s a very long post-production tail where you make everything look 100% real.”
Avatar 3 is currently expected to be in theaters in December of 2025.
