James Cameron fires Jake Sully as Avatar's narrator, announces new narrator for each sequel
Sully's son Lo'ak will be our tour guide for the third trip to Pandora
Avatar: The Way Of Water is about to cross the $2 billion mark despite being part of a culturally insignificant, memory-holed franchise. As promised by James Cameron, should anyone show up for his second Pandorian holiday, he would round out the series with another three movies. Now the culture that routinely rejects Cameron’s visions is staring down the barrel of three more sequels.
Though the filmmaker says Avatar 3 is “in the can” and has entered post-production, we don’t know much about it. For now, all that’s public is that the film introduces fire Na’vi as the series moves from the forest level to water level to fire level, like Link adventuring through various Hyrulian temples. Unlike Zelda, the perspective will change with each movie.
On the “Soundtracking With Edith Bowman” podcast, Cameron revealed that he fired Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) as Avatar’s default narrator. After two film’s with Sully’s dulcet tones whisking us from the top of the Halleluja Mountains to the pools of Awa’atlu, Sully’s eldest son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) will take the reigns. It’s what the people want.
“I’m going to take a moment when the dust clears to assess what people loved and what they responded to the most in this current release, and then I may go back and tinker a little bit,” Cameron said of Avatar 3. “We may go back and do a couple of moments here and there. It won’t be radical, but maybe fine-tune it a bit to emphasize that which people are responding to.”
“Lo’ak really emerged as a character that people went with,” Cameron continued. “So I might find ways to—he’s already the narrator. I’m giving away something here, but this is OK. I think it could be intriguing for people to think about what’s coming.”
However, while Lo’ak is the Na’vi of now, tomorrow is another story. Cameron says that a narration change will be in effect for the remaining three movies. “Jake was our voiceover narrator for movie one and for movie two, and we have a different narrator for each of the subsequent films. We see it through the eyes of a different character. Movie three is through Lo’ak’s eyes.”
While we all love Lo’ak and applaud his growth, we can only hope that movie four will finally give us what we want: An entire film from Payakan’s POV. We look forward to hearing Payakan’s words, if it’s not too painful, that is.