James Cameron is a filmmaker unlike any other. Though he has only directed a total of nine feature films over the course of 40-plus years, he has remained a palpable and prescient force within pop-culture during that time. This is the man responsible for films and franchise like The Terminator, Aliens, True Lies, Titanic, and Avatar; works that have stood the test of time and persevered through the decades. For all of his work, Cameron holds several spots in the list of highest-grossing films of all time, has won numerous Academy Awards, and has created cinematic works that resonate with audiences the world over.
So when news recently broke that Disney and Cameron were engaged in conversations regarding the apparently uncertain future of his role there and, more specifically, his planned final two Avatar films, it seemed kind of unbelievable. After all, his most recent film, Avatar: Fire and Ash, made $1.5 billion at the box office. And yet, according to a new report from The Wrap, that isn’t enough for the House of Mouse, who is seeking to get Cameron and co. to agree to make the fourth and fifth film in the series for smaller budgets and at shorter runtimes. To be frank, this is absolutely insane.
First of all, the sheer fact that something like a $1.5 billion gross can be tossed around as an excuse for why future sequels should be pared back is absolute lunacy. Avatar: Fire and Ash was still a massive hit, any way you look at it, making an immense amount of profit for Disney. While it didn’t make as much as the first film in 2009 or the prior sequel, The Way of Water, in 2022, to think that it was supposed to is ridiculous. That first film was a bona fide cultural phenomenon unto itself, the kind of lightning in a bottle you can’t recapture. And the second film was a decade-later legacy sequel, with marketing that capitalized on audiences’ combined nostalgia for the first film. Fire and Ash, coming just a few years after Way of Water, was never going to have that benefit, so the fact that it still made $1.5 billion would seem to this writer to be an indication of the strength and vitality of the franchise, not a sign of weakness.
So the entire thought process motivating these talks is crazy, but also, the talks themselves are insane. The entire appeal of these Avatar sequels has been seeing James Cameron and his team go increasingly gonzo wild with the crafting of these films, delivering these three-hour-long gargantuan epics that reach epic new heights of visual fidelity, creativity, and craft. To ask for them to be made cheaper and shorter is to suck all the life out of these things. Does anybody, even the brass at Disney, really want a straight-to-DVD-quality Avatar 4? I can’t believe that to be the case; this is just a brazen case of spreadsheets outweighing any kind of artistic intent or authenticity.
There’s a lot of talk about art versus commerce in the film industry right now, and it feels more than a bit ridiculous to be framing the Avatar sequels of all films within this larger conversation, but that’s apparently where we’re at. It’s not as if Disney is taking some massive loss by just allowing Cameron to see the final two parts of his vision through to fruition; they’ll still be making profit hand over fist. So just let the man cook, Disney. Pull it together long enough to realize that $1.5 billion is still a ton of money, and if Cameron’s Avatar sequels are going to be pulling in that kind of money, it’s more than worth your investment to see them through to their actual conclusion.
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