Fans of Avatar hoping that the third movie won't be far off may want to hold their horses after Zoe Saldana contradicted James Cameron about how finished it was.
The original Avatar film and the sequel Avatar: The Way of Water are the first and third biggest box office money-makers of all time, sandwiching Avengers: Endgame between them.
The original Avatar was released in 2009 while the sequel dropped into cinemas at the end of 2022, but fans fearing they have a long wait ahead of them may be soothed to know that director James Cameron is already working on the next ones.
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Cameron announced that the third Avatar film is set to release in cinemas next year and back in 2020, he said that the film had almost finished filming, telling Arnold Schwarzenegger that it was '95 percent complete'.
The director has since said that part of his reasoning for filming so much of the third and fourth movies before the second one had even released was to avoid his younger stars ageing out of their roles.
Following the release of Avatar: The Way of Water, he did say that the third movie needed 'all that CG magic' to be added in, but the way he spoke about the movie sounded like the actors had pretty much completed all of their filming.
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However, Cameron's previous claims of the third movie being '95 percent complete' back in 2020 have since been contradicted by Avatar star Zoe Saldana.
She spoke to Entertainment Tonight at the Oscars and said that the third Avatar film was more like '70 percent done' and that they were 'gonna go back in the summer and finish it up'.
That's unlikely to throw plans for a 2024 release of the third Avatar flick off course, nor should it interrupt Cameron's other planned sequels from releasing in 2026 and 2028.
In addition to filming plenty of the third movie before the second was even out, Cameron has also done work on the fourth film to dodge his child actors getting too old for the parts and needing to be recast.
While the second Avatar film focused heavily on water, the third will introduce a tribe of Na'vi dubbed 'the ash people' who make much more use of fire.
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If the third movie is about evil fire Na'vi, then Cameron wants to make it to a fifth movie where the inhabitants of the planet Pandora make it to Earth and see humanity's homeworld for themselves.
Although his first two movies both scored over two billion dollars at the box office, the director is sure that the films will 'get better' the further into the story he goes.
Topics: Film and TV, Celebrity, James Cameron