James Cameron has a plan for Avatar 4 and Avatar 5 — but he needs about a year to work out what it actually is. Speaking on The Empire Film Podcast, the director confirmed both films remain alive while acknowledging the franchise’s central problem: it costs too much and takes too long.
“We’re going to be looking at some new technologies to try to do them more efficiently,” Cameron said. “Because they’re hideously expensive and take a long time. I want to do them in half the time for two-thirds of the cost. That’s my metric. And so it’s going to take us a year or so to figure out how to do that.”
The comments arrive after Avatar: Fire and Ash delivered a sobering signal to Disney. The threequel earned $1.4 billion globally — enormous by most measures, but still considerably behind 2009’s original Avatar and 2022’s The Way of Water, both of which cleared $2 billion. Disney spent roughly $500 million to produce and promote Fire and Ash, meaning the billion-dollar haul left considerably thinner margins than the studio wanted.
Cameron has long been candid about the franchise’s precarious economics. Back in 2022, he told GQ that his Avatar blockbusters represent the “worst business case in movie history,” given their break-even points of roughly $1.5 billion. Chapman University film school dean Stephen Galloway framed the dilemma plainly: “It’s one thing to say, ‘This was profitable, not massively so, but the property benefits us in other ways, especially theme parks.’ It’s another to say, ‘We’re going to invest another $500 million twice,’ if you’re on this downward trajectory.”
Analysts have also noted that Fire and Ash debuted just three years after The Way of Water — a short gap compared to the previous decade-long wait — and critics pointed out that the film offered few of the technological leaps that turned the first two installments into cultural events.
Before Cameron turns his attention back to Pandora, he is first completing a 3D concert film for Billie Eilish. He described what comes after that project as going “like Roadrunner going off a cliff.” He also noted a desire to novelize the films, saying it “might be good to have the canonical record of what it was all supposed to be,” even acknowledging there is “no business model for it anymore.”
Around 22 percent of Avatar 4 was already filmed before this rethink, and the film carries a scheduled release date of December 21, 2029, with Avatar 5 slated for December 2031. Producer Rae Sanchini confirmed both sequels are in pre-production, though Cameron’s one-year technology assessment makes the 2029 date look increasingly optimistic.
Cameron previously threatened, with characteristic bluntness, that he would hold a press conference to reveal the full plot details of both films if Disney chose to end the saga after Fire and Ash. For now, the sequels survive — pending a production model that hasn’t been invented yet.
