Actor Stephen Lang said that the Avatar 5 script made him weep. The science fiction franchise's first installment was released back in late 2009. Around a week before its release, 20th Century Fox announced that it would be turning the film into a series. The story takes place in the mid-22nd century, where mankind is starting to colonize Pandora, which is a beautiful landscape that is hospitable of life. When a marine named Jake Sully's (Sam Worthington) morals come into question, he begins to wonder if he should continue following orders or protect Pandora from colonization.
The franchise is set to be composed of a total of five films. Each of the sequels supposedly follows self-contained plots with an overall narrative that connects all of the movies. With the Sully family being at the core of these films, Jake's story is only the beginning. With the projected total budget for the franchise being somewhere between $1 billion and $2 billion, the Avatar series will be one of the most costly series to ever be made. Little is known about the plot of Avatar 2 or its follow-ups.
In an interview with Collider, Lang talked some about Avatar while promoting his upcoming movie Don't Breathe 2. While he understandably didn't reveal anything about the direction of the franchise, he did express how the scripts made him feel. In particular, he said that the script for Avatar 5 made him weep, as he was so moved by it. Lang was absolutely captured by the places that the franchise goes. Read on below for his full statement on the final script of the franchise:
“When I finished the last script, I was weeping. I just thought it was so beautiful. Yeah, the final script because he's telling a great, great story, an original story, a beautiful, beautiful story, and I was just incredibly moved by it. I hope and I trust and believe that audiences will be, too, because one of the things that he does really, really well is he moves it from the page to the stage in a way that that is very literal. You know what I mean? You really see it. What you read is what you get from him, I think, and more.”
The first Avatar cost an estimated $237 million, although it brought in a reported $2.847 billion. The film was the highest-grossing movie worldwide for almost ten years, when it was ultimately beaten by 2019's Avengers: Endgame. However, Avatar once again took its record back after a re-release. Given the film's massive success and advanced visual technology, it should come as no surprise that the studio would still be interested in delivering these sequels. They each already have release dates within the years of 2022, 2024, 2026, and 2028, respectively. However, it does beg the question of whether they will be as successful as the first one, with the first sequel not hitting theaters until 13 years after the original's release.
Since audiences have only had the opportunity to see the first Avatar, there's no way to speculate where the franchise goes leading up to the final installment. However, given the fact that it moved Lang to such emotions could mean that the franchise moves in some other dramatic directions that moviegoers aren't seeing quite yet. Since this series has pulled Cameron so far away from working on other original projects, hopefully this franchise reaches the heights that Lang claims it will. Stay tuned for more information on the Avatar franchise as the release date for the first sequel approaches.
Source: Collider
