James Cameron already has ideas for Avatars 6 and 7

Legendary director James Cameron returns to the movies for Avatar: The Way of Water, the followup to his historically huge hit Avatar, which came out all the way back in 2009. That’s a long time to wait between installments, and some have wondered whether people have forgotten about Avatar in the meantime. Cameron, to put it mildly, is not bothered.

“There’s skepticism in the marketplace around, ‘Oh, did it ever make any real cultural impact? Can anybody even remember the characters’ names?’” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “If people are less likely to remember Jake Sully than, say, Luke Skywalker, that’s partly because Avatar is only one movie into its mythology. When you have extraordinary success, you come back within the next three years. That’s just how the industry works. You come back to the well, and you build that cultural impact over time. Marvel had maybe 26 movies to build out a universe, with the characters cross-pollinating. So it’s an irrelevant argument. We’ll see what happens after this film.”

It sounds like Cameron is in this for the long haul. And indeed, Disney is planning five Avatar movies; Cameron has already shot most of the third, so we’ll probably get that one no matter what. As for 4 and 5, we’ll wait and see how The Way of Water does.

Cameron is typically practical about the whole affair. “We’ll probably finish movie three regardless because it’s all shot,” he said. “We’d have to really crater for it not to seem like it was worth the additional investment. We’d have to leave a smoking hole in the ground. Now, hopefully, we get to tell the whole thing because five’s better than four, four’s better than three, and three’s better than two.”

James Cameron doesn’t think there could be an Avatar TV show…yet

And if Disney does make all five Avatar movies, there’s no guarantee that they’d stop there. In fact, Cameron already has ideas for Avatars 6 and 7, although given how long it took him to make Avatar 2, he doesn’t see himself directing them should the franchise get that far. “I’d be 89 by then,” the 68-year-old filmmaker said. “Obviously, I’m not going to be able to make Avatar movies indefinitely. I would have to train somebody how to do this because, I don’t care how smart you are as a director, you don’t know how to do this.”

So Cameron is going hard on Avatar as a franchise. Why did it take so long? After the first one was a hit, Fox (which was since purchased by Disney) wanted more, but Cameron himself put the brakes on it. At the time, he was more interested in his other passions, like oceanic exploration and environmental sustainability. “I started confronting this issue of, ‘Do I even want to make another movie, let alone another Avatar movie?’” he remembered. “Because I was having so much fun.”

We don’t know exactly what changed between then and now; I suspect the success of the MCU, the biggest franchise in the history of movies, had something to do with it. In any case, these days all the biggest franchises are spilling over into television. Is that something that Avatar could do?

“The problem with these CG characters is that they’re so cost- and labor-intensive that it really doesn’t work for TV,” Cameron said. “Now, come back in 10 years, with a lot of machine deep learning. Insert it into our pipeline, which we hope to do, over time. We might be able to get to a TV schedule, but it doesn’t interest me right now.”

But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. Avatar: The Way of Water comes out in theaters on December 16.

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