Thirteen years after the original Avatar, the new Avatar film: The Way of Water (ATWOTW) has broken records by bringing in over $1 billion in just 16 days. Director James Cameron has said that there will be three more movies coming out in the years to come, with one already filmed and set on coming out in December 2023. The movie will shine light on a new Navi tribe.
While nobody is sure why the ATWOTW movie took so long to film, Cameron has revealed that they waited to shoot the sequel due to the lack of technology at the time and the time it took to write the scripts for the rest of the saga. After the casting was set in 2017, they shot both Avatar 2 along with Avatar 3 at the same time to ensure that the child actors didn’t age within the upcoming movie. Within those three years, Cameron’s vision came to light as the actors were put in a 900,000-gallon tank rigged to mimic the waves and currents of the ocean. Lead actress Zoe Saldaña, who embodies Neytiri, learned to free dive with a personal record of over five minutes.
She stated, “Trust me it’s a lot, I think it only happened once, and it never happened again”.
Avatar 2 was said to have needed to make $2 billion in the box office to break even. The first Avatar film was such a smashing hit, and it is still the highest gross earning movie of all time with it almost breaking $3 billion to date, and Cameron is confident that Avatar 2 will be to the same amount of success. He says that the movie will easily break even due to the amount of work and art that has been put into the film. Cameron expressed his fondness of the ocean in some of his films: Titanic, the Abyss, and now Avatar;
Cameron has said, ” this is my love letter to the oceans.”