James Cameron and his team are starting to work on Avatar sequels in New Zealand after behind shut down for a few months due to the coronavirus. Producer Jon Landau is talking about the upcoming sequel and what we will see in it.
During a recent interview with Radio New Zealand, Landau talks about what it’s like coming back to work and also shared some new features on the story that the sequel will tell us.
“We feel very comfortable because of the actions of your government and also the responsibility the people took to really curb the virus there. So we feel we’re coming back to the safest place in the world possible thanks to a team of people that we’ve worked with. We believe we have a very thoughtful, detailed and diligent safety plan that will keep everybody as safe as possible in these unprecedented times.”
When talking about the story that the sequel will tell, the producer offers the following tease:
“This is the story of the Sully family and what one does to keep their family together. Jake and Neytiri have a family in this movie, they are forced to leave their home, they go out and explore the different regions of Pandora, including spending quite a bit of time on the water, around the water, in the water.”
We know a big part of the story will be set in the water, and I’m actually kind of thrilled to see how the VFX work looks when the movie is finished.
Landau was that about whether or not the same audiences who turned the original film into one of the biggest box office hits of all time, would come back for the sequel after all these years, he said:
“I think, why do people turn to entertainment today, more so than ever? I think it’s to escape, to escape the world we’re in, to escape the other pressures they have in their lives… I think with Avatar, we have an opportunity to allow people to escape to an incredible world with incredible characters that they will follow, in much the same way as Peter Jackson was able to do with Lord of the Rings, so that’s what we’re looking forward to doing.”
It’ll surely be exciting to see how these upcoming sequels do at the box office.
It’s been explained before that Avatar 2 is set many years after Avatar. “At the center of each of our four movies will be the Sully family. Each sequel will play as a standalone movie. Each movie’s story will come to its own conclusion… However, when looked at as a whole, the journey across all four movies will create an even larger connected epic saga for audiences around the world.”
Landau opened up about the setting for the sequels, saying:
“As we’ve moved on with the sequels to Avatar we made a very conscious decision to stage the whole four sequels on Pandora. We don’t need to go to another world if we want water, we’re going to go to the oceans of Pandora.
”It’s a continuation of the same characters, but what happen when warriors that are willing to go on suicide charges, and leap off cliffs on to the back of big orange toruks, what happens when they grow up and have their own kids? It becomes a very different story. Now the kids are the risk-takers and the change-makers. So, it’s interesting, but it makes sense to me. Everybody’s either a parent, or they had parents at the very least, and if you look at the big successful franchises now, they’re pretty much uninterested in that.”
It was also revealed that there are different clans of Na’vi all over Pandora:
“We’re going to go to totally different environments, we’re going to meet different cultures. Just like our planet is as diverse culturally as we are environmentally. We want to introduce people to different cultures. In the first movie, we only met the Omaticaya clan, and they are the clan here allowing us to come to the Valley of Mo’ara. But as we venture out we’re going to different environments and different clans.”
The Avatar sequels also star Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Joel David Moore, Dileep Rao, Stephen Lang, Sigourney Weaver, and Matt Gerald. New cast members include Kate Winslet, Edie Falco, Michelle Yeoh, Vin Diesel, Jemaine Clement, and Oona Chaplin.
Avatar 2 will hit theaters on December 27, 2021, followed by Avatar 3 in December 2023; then Avatar 4 in December 2025; and finally Avatar 5 on December 20