Featured Image Credit: 20th Century Studios
Topics: TV And Film, Disney
Avatar 4 and Avatar 5 are now greenlit thanks to the continued success of Avatar: The Way of Water, which has so far brought in $1.708 billion at the box office and nominated as one of the best films of 2022 by the American Film Institute.
There's significant shilly shallying over the cultural impact of Avatar. No one remembers the plot of the film, some say. It's essentially Dances with Wolves set on an alien planet, adds another. Both things can be true and Avatar: The Way of Water can still make an absolutely silly amount of money in an even sillier number of days. In its first fortnight, it raked in $1.1 billion, soon surging to become the highest-grossing film of 2022 and the seventh-highest-grossing film of all time. This all sounds good - but the future of the franchise was in jeopardy owing to the film's huge budget and the fact that it hinged on its returns in an already busy month for movies.
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Director James Cameron has now allayed fans' fears. “It looks like just with the momentum that the film has now that will easily pass our break even in the next few days,” he said in an interview with HBO Max (thanks to The Hollywood Reporter). “It looks like I can’t wiggle out of this, I’m gonna have to do these other sequels... The point is we’re going to be okay. I’m sure that we’ll have a discussion soon with with the top folks at Disney about the game plan going forward for Avatar 3, which is already in the can - we’ve already captured and photographed the whole film so we’re in extended post-production to do all that CG magic.”
Of course, while we wait for Avatar 3, there's the open-world Frontiers of Pandora game to look forward to. From Massive Entertainment, we got our first glimpse of the game in 2021 and at the moment, details have been light on the storyline. What we do know is that it's set in the one-year leap in the events of The Way of Water and takes players to the western areas of the world. It was intended to release in the summer of last year, but ended up being delayed into 2023 or 2024, depending on how the developer gets on. “We want to make [Avatar] a video game industry brand,” said Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot in July. “It is important for us that we come with something that is perfect.”