James Cameron Talks Avatar Sequel Delay Concerns

There’s no doubt that filmmaker James Cameron is one of the greats – having created pop culture staples like Alien, Titanic, and Terminator throughout an untouchable box office career. Then, of course, there’s Avatar, the 2009 big-budget project that completely ignited a 3D craze and went on to set additional box office records for Cameron before earning itself a far-off franchise that was (and still remains) several years away from narrative completion. But after all this time, the sequel to Avatar, titled Avatar: The Way of Water, is inching its way closer to a December 2022 release, with multiple sequels confirmed and mapped out through 2028.

Currently, the sequel trailer has already amassed millions of views and plenty of buzz across the board. Still, when the filmmaker recently spoke to The New York Times, he admitted that there were some concerns about the spacing of the franchise. Cameron explained to the publication, “I think I could have made a sequel two years later and have it bomb because people didn’t relate to the characters or the direction of the film. My personal experience goes like this: I made a sequel called Aliens seven years after the first movie. It was very well received. I made a sequel called Terminator 2 seven years after the first movie. It did an order of magnitude of more, in revenue than the first film.”

The decorated director went on to explain, “I was a little concerned that I had stretched the tether too far, in our fast-paced, modern world, with Avatar 2 coming in 12 years later. Right until we dropped the teaser trailer, and we got 148 million views in 24 hours. There’s that scarce seen but wondered at principle, which is, ‘Wow, we haven’t seen that in a long time, but I remember how cool it was back then.’ Does that play in our favor? I don’t know. I guess we’re going to find out.”

Avatar: The Way of Water is getting a theatrical release on December 16, 2022.