Now that Avatar 2 is profitable, James Cameron is ready to make all those other Avatars

Whether you’re surprised at Avatar: The Way Of Water’s success due to its predecessor’s supposed low cultural impact or not at all surprised due to James Cameron’s knack for box office magic, the result remains the same. The sequel is a bonafide box office hit, surpassing Top Gun: Maverick as the highest-grossing movie released in 2022 and steadily rising in the ranks of all-time top-grossing international blockbusters. Even raking in all of that cash (a whopping $1.5 billion), the film likely hasn’t yet broken even on its astronomical budget. Nevertheless, Cameron is feeling complete confidence (as is his wont; though in this case, it’s certainly justifiable) and looking towards Pandora’s future.

“It looks like just with the momentum that the film has now that will easily pass our break even in the next few days, so it looks like I can’t wiggle out of this, I’m gonna have to do these other sequels,” Cameron says in a new episode of HBO Max’s Who’s Talking To Chris Wallace? (per The Hollywood Reporter). “I know what I’m going to be doing the next six or seven years.”

Poor little rich director, trapping himself in the world of the Na’vi. Of course, that’s exactly where he wants to be; in a recent interview with Empire Magazine, he claimed “the world of Avatar is so sprawling that I can tell most of the stories I want to tell within it and try many of the stylistic techniques that I hope to explore.” And if he does have ideas outside of Pandora, he gets “great satisfaction” out of sharing them with other directors, as with Kathryn Bigelow (Strange Days) and Robert Rodriguez (Alita: Battle Angel). “I look forward to more collaborations in the future with directors I admire,” Cameron shared.

On Who’s Talking, Cameron clarifies that the amount of money Way Of Water needs to make to justify a sequel “is actually less” than the reported $2 billion. “The point is we’re going to be okay,” he says. “I’m sure that we’ll have a discussion soon 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. And then Avatar 4 and 5 are both written. We even have some of 4 in the can. We’ve begun a franchise at this point. We’ve begun a saga that can now play out over multiple films.”