Later this year, Avatar: Fire and Ash will continue the saga that writer and director James Cameron began in 2009 with Avatar. But according to Cameron, the third film in the franchise was an unexpected chapter in his initial plan for three sequels. Instead, Cameron ended up splitting Avatar: The Way of Water into two different movies, in part because too much was happening in a single script.
“In a nutshell, we had too many great ideas packed into act one of movie 2,” Cameron told Empire. “The [film] was moving like a bullet train, and we weren’t drilling down enough on character. So I said, ‘Guys, we’ve got to split it.’”
To help him craft the story of the movies, Cameron put together a writer’s room that included Josh Friedman, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, and Shane Salerno. During the Empire piece, Silver also weighed in on the benefits of expanding Fire and Ash into its own movie.
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“The characters needed to breathe,” noted Silver. “These movies are a lot more than just propulsive plot and gorgeous spectacle. I mean, these are real characters.”
“These characters are amalgams of us, our childhoods, our role as parents, the mistakes we made, and probably to some extent continue to make as parents,” added Cameron. “I mean, Jake is a hard-ass [bleep]. He’s very hard on his kids. Well, that’s me.”
Cameron also stated that Fire and Ash “will actually be a little bit longer than [The Way of Water],” which ran 3 hours and 12 minutes in 2022. Production designer Ben Procter recently teased that Fire and Ash will have “a battle for the ages” between the Na’vi and the human invaders on a much larger scale than the battle at the end of The Way of Water.
Avatar: Fire and Ash will be released in theaters on December 15.