James Cameron recently told “The Empire Film Podcast” that he wants to make his next two “Avatar” sequels in a much shorter time span and for a lot less money.
“You know, I’ll be doing some writing. I’ve got a number of projects that I’m cooking,” Cameron explained. “And ‘Avatar 4’ and ‘5’ are still floating out there. We’re going to be looking at some new technologies to try to do them more efficiently. Because they’re hideously expensive and take a long time. I want to do them in half the time for two-thirds of the cost. That’s my metric. And so it’s going to take us a year or so to figure out how to do that.”
“Avatar” is the only franchise in which every installment crossed the coveted $1 billion mark at the worldwide box office. The 2009 original grossed $2.7 billion through its original run. The follow-up, “The Way of Water,” made $2.4 billion, and last year’s “Fire and Ash,” earned $1.48 billion. Cameron is most likely reworking his approach in response to the “Fire and Ash” fall off. While $1.48 billion would be a lifetime best for most other studios, Disney would’ve liked the “Fire and Ash” box office to climb closer to its predecessors, especially considering its $400 million budget and the global marketing campaign, which likely cost hundreds of millions more.
Cameron told Entertainment Weekly in December 2026 that he would hold a press conference to unveil the plot details of “Avatar 4” and “Avatar 5” if Disney decided to end his sci-fi saga after “Fire and Ash.”
“I don’t know if the saga goes beyond this point. I hope it does,” Cameron said. “But, you know, we prove that business case every time we go out… If we don’t get to make 4 and 5, for whatever reason, I’ll hold a press conference and I’ll tell you what we were gonna do. How’s that?”
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