Michelle Yeoh actually won't be on Pandora until Avatar 4

James Cameron’s plans are measured in centuries. The Avatar franchise and its far-reaching implications necessarily has to be meticulously thought out. The first film came out in 2009, and the fourth is scheduled a full 20 years later. Yet because Cameron is a mastermind, he’s always been able to see the franchise’s future clearly. It’s only a matter of when he lets the rest of us in on his vision. Like this little tidbit he told Entertainment Weekly: “Michelle Yeoh won’t be in three. She’s in four and five.” 

Now, Yeoh was cast in the franchise way back in 2019. In 2021, the late Jon Landau posted a picture of Yeoh on set with the caption “Michelle Yeoh kept Jim busy between set-ups while filming Avatar 3!” But her involvement “got a little bit misreported,” according to Cameron. “She will be coming in soon to do her part, which is an interesting, fun character. I mean, we’re getting ahead of ourselves now. This whole thing has been planned for years and years,” he said. “The scripts were all written years ago, through the end of movie five. So we’ve been working on parts of 4 even as we go along, mostly because we’ve got this young cast. We had to shoot them all while they were still young.”

Shooting them all while they were still young includes filming all of Avatar: The Way Of Water, the third film Avatar: Fire And Ash, and part of the fourth film all on the same shoot. Landau previously confirmed that they’d locked in “most of the first act of Avatar 4,” so that explains where Michelle Yeoh came in. And Cameron is bound and determined to see the whole thing through (as is his wont). “I mean, they’re going to have to stop me,” the 69-year-old filmmaker told The Hollywood Reporter of directing installments four and five. “I got plenty of energy, love doing what I’m doing. Why would I not? And they’re written, by the way. I just reread both of them about a month ago. They’re cracking stories. They’ve got to get made. Look, if I get hit by a bus and I’m in an iron lung, somebody else is going to do it.”

As for his Avatar 4 star, “We love Michelle,” Cameron said to EW. “She was always a movie star, but she’s blown up into a huge, huge phenomenon. I look forward to working there.”