James Cameron is back to work on the Avatar sequels, and some on-set photos give us a glimpse of what to expect. Under the new ownership of Disney following their acquisition of Fox, the Avatar franchise is now set in stone. With a reported budget of $1 billion over four movies, Avatar could be a key part of Disney’s cinematic future, a new blockbuster with international appeal to join alongside the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars. Avatar 2 currently has a release date of December 17, 2021, with the following three sequels to be released on December 22, 2023, December 19, 2025 and December 17, 2027.
It’s been over a decade since Cameron debuted Avatar, which helped to usher in a new age of film-making. The sheer spectacle of his sci-fi epic, with its pioneering and hyper-realistic use of CGI motion capture, dazzled audiences and became the highest-grossing movie of all time, a title it held onto until 2019’s Avengers: Endgame. Cameron spoke frequently of his grand ambitions for Avatar as a ground-breaking cinematic franchise over the years. He promised something bigger and more unique for the world of Pandora, but substantial news of Avatar’s future was thin on the ground for a long time. Even as it remained a record-breaker, Avatar seemed to fall out of the popular consciousness as the era of superheroes, Disney-owned Lucasfilm, and movies like Mad Max: Fury Road reigned supreme. It didn’t inspire a legion of devoted fans and even its critical gloss wore off quickly as people took issue with its cliched story and characters. It seemed like the world had no use for an Avatar franchise.
Cameron is now back at work on the series in New Zealand following production shut down caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The film has released a tiny handful of set photos, a remarkably small amount of details given the scope of the franchise and hype surrounding it. Here’s what those set images reveal about the long-awaited sequel.
Avatar 2 Is Happening in a Post-COVID World
The Avatar sequels began live-action filming in New Zealand in the Spring of 2019 and concluded in November with plans to resume the following year. Performance capture filming started way back in September 2017, which gives us a strong reminder of just how ambitious Cameron's plans are. Live-action filming came to a halt on March 17, 2020, as New Zealand went into lockdown in response to the coronavirus. Thanks to the country's strong response to the virus, Cameron and company were able to return to New Zealand in June. On June 16, producer Jon Landau shared an image on Instagram of Cameron back in production, with his crew seemingly social distancing as much as possible.
The image is a stark reminder that filmmaking may never be the same again following the pandemic. Social distancing is, to put it bluntly, impossible when shooting a movie or TV show. Cameron's cast and crew had to do a two-week-long government-supervised isolation period at a hotel in Wellington before they would resume filming. The cast and crew are also all staying at the same hotel while filming and limiting their movements to avoid the potential spreading of the virus. This will not be a unique situation once Hollywood decides to go back to work.
James Cameron Is Pushing Boundaries in Underwater Film-making
The most recent set image shows Britain Dalton, an actor new to the Avatar franchise, riding an underwater vehicle while dressed up in a motion-capture suit, complete with camera in front of his face. Another image released earlier by Landau showed off some of the underwater vehicles that would be featured in the movie, including the Matador, "a high speed forward command vessel."
The big hook for Avatar 2 so far is Cameron’s pushing of the boundaries of underwater filmmaking. Cameron's modus operandi as a director for many decades now has been to use the most ground-breaking and advanced technology as a means to further evolve old-school Hollywood storytelling, from the liquid metal CGI in Terminator 2 to the immense recreation of the Titanic for the movie of the same name. Cameron has already dabbled in underwater movie-making with 1989's The Abyss, which used a series of huge water tanks and a level of physical and emotional labor that caused a number of the cast to fall ill and have minor breakdowns. With Avatar 2, Cameron wants to take that to the next level. Cameron's intent is to capture underwater scenes as accurately as possible, something that modern filmmaking has struggled with, even as technology has advanced. CGI water still doesn't feel quite like real water. It is certainly an ambitious aim, one that has never truly been done before and could once again change the game of cinema if he pulls it off.
Avatar 2 Will Feature Pioneering Underwater Performance Capture
A key feature of this already challenging underwater production is that the actors had to train to not only act under these circumstances but to do so while wearing full motion-capture gear. The film is said to primarily follow the underwater communities of Pandora, known as the Metkayina clan. An image from May of this year showed actors Zoe Saldana, Sam Worthington, Kate Winslet, and Cliff Curtis in a 900,000-gallon tank where they were filming underwater scenes while surrounded by lots of white balls that were designed to stop light from reflecting on the water's surface.
Winslet is set to play Ronal, a free-diver of the Metkayina tribe, while Curtis is playing their leader, Tonowari. While details of the next four movies' plots remain scant, it is known that Avatar will continue to follow Jake Sully (Worthington), his mate Neytiri (Saldana), and their family as they are forced to leave home and explore the rest of Pandora's rich world as an old threat returns. That threat will likely be the humans of the RDA mining program from the first movie since most of those actors are returning, including the main antagonist Stephen Lang, despite his character being dead.
It had already been revealed that the cast had been taught to free-dive for the movie, including the pre-teen children playing Jake and Neytiri's kids. This process allowed them to learn how to calmly remain underwater while holding their breath for up to four minutes at a time. This combination of underwater production and performance capture has never been done before. As Cameron himself noted in 2015 in an interview with Collider:
"It’s never been done before and it’s very tricky because our motion capture system, like most motion capture systems, is what they call optical base, meaning that it uses markers that are photographed with hundreds of cameras. The problem with water is not the underwater part, but the interface between the air and the water, which forms a moving mirror. That moving mirror reflects all the dots and markers, and it creates a bunch of false markers. It’s a little bit like a fighter plane dumping a bunch of chaff to confuse the radar system of a missile. It creates thousands of false targets, so we’ve had to figure out how to get around that problem, which we did. Basically, whenever you add water to any problem, it just gets ten times harder. So, we’ve thrown a lot of horsepower, innovation, imagination and new technology at the problem, and it’s taken us about a year and a half now to work out how we’re going to do it."
It remains to be seen if the Avatar sequels will capture the world’s imagination and bring in the same level of financial clout as the first one, especially since audience anticipation may have lagged since the first film's release. What is certain, however, is that James Cameron remains committed to making the sort of technological advances in cinema that only he has the drive, ambition, and industry-wide support to do. Even in the precarious new post-COVID-19 age of Hollywood, Cameron remains as driven as ever to bring the world of the Avatar franchise to life.
