James Cameron is finally happy to say that Avatar: The Way of Water will ‘easily’ make the profit it needs to in order to green light his work on the fourth and fifth films in the franchise.
The Avatar sequel was under pressure to make a lot of money in order to generate a profit (Picture: 20th Century Studios)
The confident director has returned to his usual self as the film passed $1.5billion (£1.24bn) at the global box office and pipped Top Gun: Maverick to become the highest-grossing film of 2022, joking that he ‘can’t wriggle out’ of making the final two Avatar movies.
(We know he’s a keen bean and doesn’t want to anyway.)
He had previously admitted that the movie was ‘very f**king expensive’ to make and would have to be the third or fourth highest-grossing film in history, just to break even (the first film is still at number one).
Cameron also publicly stated that he would end the whole franchise early, after the already-filmed third instalment, if it became apparent that audiences no longer ‘give a s**t’.
Now though, fears have been allayed as he shared: ‘It looks like with the momentum that the film has now that we’ll easily pass our break even in the next few days, so it looks like I can’t wiggle out of this and I’m gonna have to do these other sequels.
James Cameron joked that he now ‘can’t wriggle out’ of making Avatar 4 and 5
‘I know what I’m going to be doing the next six or seven years.’
Appearing on this week’s episode of Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace? on HBO Max (via Variety), he added that the point was ‘we’re going to be okay’ as he shared he was ‘sure that we’ll have a discussion soon with the top folks at Disney about the game plan going forward for Avatar 3’.
He explained of the five-film saga he’s lined up: ‘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.’
Avatar: The Way of Water has passed $1.5billion at the box office (Picture: 20th Century Studios)
The Terminator and Titanic writer-director also clarified the comments he’s been reporting as saying about the gross required, with many interpreting his quotes about where The Way of Water would need to place in the top 10 as meaning it needed to reach $2billion (£1.65bn) to ‘break even’.
He said that he ‘never actually gave it a number. I said it would has to be among the highest-grossing films in history and somebody else applied that number and it got picked up’.
‘The number is actually less,’ he revealed.
Cameron previously spilled details on what fans can expect from Avatar 3 as he shared that it will feature the first ‘negative’ example of the Na’vi, with new fire tribe the Ash People.
