Have you been waiting with bated breath for more Pandora ever since Avatar released in 2009 and 3-D-CGI'd its way into your heart? No? Yes? Well, it doesn't really matter!
Director James Cameron has been teasing Avatar sequels since the release of the first film. Cameron has made Avatar his life's work, starting on a treatment for the story in 1994. This makes it almost 30 years since Cameron conceived of the sparkling blue world of Pandora. Considering that it's been 12 years since he announced his plans to make a sequel, Avatar fans must be the most patient fandom on this planet. Production for the Avatar follow-ups have been delayed due to the pandemic and technological deficiencies for the grandness of Cameron's vision. But the wait is finally over. Avatar: The Way of Water is making a splash at a theater near you. Not only that, but so many damn sequels are on the way, that the 2020s may very well become the decade of Avatar. So, what are you waiting for? Read on for everything we know about the Avatar sequels. And consider this story spoiler territory from here on out.
Avatar The Way of Water is just the beginning of our return to Pandora—it's just the first of the four sequels on the way. Avatar 3 has the working title of Avatar: The Seed Bearer. It filmed simultaneously alongside Avatar: The Way of Water in New Zealand and wrapped at the end of 2020. It is set to be released on December 20, 2024. Meanwhile, Avatar 4 will hit theaters on December 18, 2026. In September, Cameron announced that Avatar 4 had already begun production. Avatar 5 is set to drop on December 22, 2028. Got all that? Good.
The Way of Water opened to $134 million in the North America box office in its first weekend and $441.6 million worldwide, so it sure looks like we'll see those films brought to life. The Way of Water introduced us to a whole family of new characters, including Kiri, Sully, and Neytiri's adopted daughter—who may or may not be the biological progeny of Dr. Grace Augustine?? We also meet our protagonists' biological sons, Neteyam and Lo'ak. Also, we're introduced to their biological daughter, Tuk. Of course, there's Colonel Miles Quaritch's estranged human son, Spider. (Or as Kiri calls him, "monkey boy.") Don't forget the whole new tribe of people who live in the many scattered islands across Pandora, the Metkayina.
If you feel overwhelmed with glorious underwater motion capture scenes, 3-D shots that move at 48 frames per second, and new environments and cultures, you're not alone. But luckily, you'll have at least three more sequels to process it all—and more.
“The goal is to tell an extremely compelling story on an emotional basis,” Cameron told Total Film. “I would say the emphasis in the new film is more on character, more on story, more on relationships, more on emotion. We didn’t spend as much time on relationship and emotion in the first film as we do in the second film, and it’s a longer film, because there’s more characters to service. There’s more story to service.”
Somehow, The Way of Water's three-plus-hour runtime still left us with lots of questions. Are Kiri and Spider going to make out? Are Neytiri and Sully going to have more kids and start their own Pandoran basketball team? Is Avatar-fied Colonel Quaritch ever going to get over his cliched vow of vengeance? Will Payakan come back and take the Sullys out for another deep-diving adventure? Now that Sully and fam are "sea people," will they venture out and introduce themselves to the other families on Pandora? When are we going to see the volcano people or the swamp people of Pandora?!
“Indigenous rights, sustainability and the oceans are the three things that drive me in my non-Hollywood life, and I figured I could express how I feel about those things in this greater landscape," Cameron recently said to USA Today. We hope that means even more of Cameron's signature heavy-handed parables about the fight to save the natural environment and scolding critique of colonialism.
Rest assured, my fellow Na'vi fans: we don't have to wait as long for the next Avatar sequel. It looks like we're in for a long, long decade of Avatar adventures.
