Avatar: The Way of Water is finally coming to cinemas, 13 years after the original film was released.
Believe it or not, Avatar 2 is happening, and Avatar 2 also has a title and a teaser trailer we’re going to see soon. We have the latest release date and even some set photos. On top of that, James Cameron’s hit 3D action movie isn’t just having one sequel, either.
It’s been over a decade since the first film of James Cameron’s Avatar franchise was released in theaters, and now, fans are highly anticipating the next installment. Also, it is already titled Avatar: The Way of Water. However, there are four planned sequels for the Avatar franchise.
Cameron is also working on other planned Avatar sequels, but they will probably take years to complete. For now, let’s focus on getting hyped for the second movie, Avatar: The Way of Water, and here’s everything you need to know about the highly-anticipated sequel.
The teaser trailer debuted at CinemaCon on April 27, 2022, where the title was also revealed. It’s not online yet, but should be in early May ahead of the sequel’s long-awaited release in cinemas in December 2022.
Avatar 2 release date
Avatar 2 is coming out on December 16, 2022, a year after its previous Dec. 2021 release date, which wasn’t its first date. All production on the project was shut down.
Dec. 17 was the date previously published on 20th Century Films’ Avatar.com website. Then, the official Avatar twitter account tweeted a letter from Cameron explaining how the film’s holiday release has been cancelled “due to the impact the pandemic has had on our schedule.”
Avatar 2 began production on April 22, 2017, according to a Facebook post made on the film franchise’s official page. That page showed four release dates for the Avatar films that have been either scrapped or changed around, which claimed that Avatar 2 would release in December 2020.
The full set of release dates is as follows:
- Avatar 2: December 16, 2022
- Avatar 3: December 20, 2024
- Avatar 4: December 18, 2026
- Avatar 5: December 22, 2028
Trailer
The trailer highlights the epic scale of the upcoming adventure. Just like the first movie, Avatar: The Way of Water is certain to offer our eyes a lot to feast upon, and for a long time too: The blockbuster’s runtime is over three hours long. This time, however, the franchise gets even more ambitious as it takes us to an underwater world that challenged production while filming in water tanks.
Avatar: The Way of Water Plot
The official film plot reads: “Jake Sully and Neytiri have formed a family and are doing everything to stay together. However, they must leave their home and explore the regions of Pandora. When an ancient threat resurfaces, Jake must fight a difficult war against the humans.”
James Cameron has revealed only a few details about Avatar 2, the most important being that much of the story will take place underwater around a settlement by the Metkayina people.
The official film plot reads: “Jake Sully and Neytiri have formed a family and are doing everything to stay together. However, they must leave their home and explore the regions of Pandora. When an ancient threat resurfaces, Jake must fight a difficult war against the humans.”
Avatar 2 will be set 12 years after the events of the first Avatar film. Neytiri is now the high priestess and Sully is the chieftain of their clan. They’ve settled down and started a family. It’s also reported that they will be journeying beyond the forests of Pandora into underwater and volcanic environments that Cameron said will make “you shit yourself with your mouth wide open”.
According to plot details, the R.D.A. (the invading human military force that brought Jake Sully to Pandora in the first film) will return to invade Pandora once again.
Avatar: The Way of Water Filming
Avatar 2 filmed its motion capture scenes underwater to capture the importance of water.
Cameron talked to Collider about it, explaining, “It’s never been done before and it’s very tricky because our motion capture system, like most motion capture systems, is what they call optical base, meaning that it uses markers that are photographed with hundreds of cameras.”
“The problem with water is not the underwater part, but the interface between the air and the water, which forms a moving mirror. That moving mirror reflects all the dots and markers, and it creates a bunch of false markers.
“It’s a little bit like a fighter plane dumping a bunch of chaff to confuse the radar system of a missile. It creates thousands of false targets, so we’ve had to figure out how to get around that problem, which we did.”
During an interview with Empire, Producer Jon Landau (Avatar, Titanic) shared some details about Jake and Neytiri’s mixed-species family, which includes three Na’vi children named Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), and Tuktirey (Trinity Bliss). The couple has also adopted a human son named Miles Sorocco AKA “Spider” (Jack Champion).
In May 2020, a teaser picture of the cast doing some motion-capture work in a 900,000-gallon water tank was released online, showing that Cameron wasn’t kidding about the scale of the work.
Avatar: The Way of Water Cast
The core cast of the original Avatar are all on contract, so Cameron’s stars will be back in when it finally hits.
Accordingly, Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana reprise their roles as Jake and Neytiri, and they are joined by Stephen Lang who returns as the dead Colonel Miles Quaritch. It has been revealed he will be the main villain, although the exact circumstances surrounding his resurrection have not been confirmed!
Sigourney Weaver returns as an as-yet-unnamed new character, as well as Kate Winslet who has been confirmed to play the role of Ronal in the upcoming sequels
Additional Information
Why was Avatar 2 delayed?
Before coronavirus became an issue, the sequels had already taken a long time to start filming, largely due to Cameron’s bold choice to work on three of them simultaneously.
That required all the scripts to be written and a huge amount of design work to be completed before cameras could start rolling, not to mention the substantial technological development required to make his underwater vision a reality.
“The scripts took four years. You can call that a delay, but it’s not really a delay because, from the time we pushed the button to really go make the movies [until now], we’re clicking along perfectly.”
When the coronavirus epidemic hit the world. Like most films around the world, shooting on Avatar 2 was halted as the world locked down. But thanks to New Zealand’s powerful response to the coronavirus, production was able to restart relatively quickly.
Avatar 2 resumed shooting on Monday 15th June 2020 and finally wrapped that September, after a truly epic production cycle that has stretched far beyond what most fans had expected.
Avatar 2 May Reveals Water Banshees
The trailer(which is not online yet) for Avatar: The Way of Water shows a flight of Banshees swooping over Pandora’s oceans. Introduced in the first Avatar film, the Na’vi of the Omaticaya tribe bond with Banshees so they can take to the skies. Curiously, the colors of the Banshees in the trailer look a little different, perhaps suggesting they’re a different sub-species – Water Banshees as opposed to Mountain Banshees. They still possess the neural interface, however, meaning they can be flown by Na’vi.
Avatar 2 Introduces A New Na’vi Coastal Tribe
Avatar: The Way of Water introduces a new tribe of Na’vi, called the Metkayina. According to producer Jon Landau, the plot of Avatar 2 will see the Sullys forced to flee their home environment in the rainforest. They will seek sanctuary with the Metkayina, but will struggle to fit in – likely in part because of Jake’s human origin, as well as the fact he and Neytiri have adopted a human child. “They become the fish out of the water,” Landau explained. “They become the fish out of the water both culturally and just environmentally.” The Metkayina appear to live on the very shores of the ocean, as comfortable in the rainforest as they are swimming in the reefs; the roots of Pandora’s great trees sweep out into the ocean, and there are hints of sandbanks and estuarine environments in the shots as well.
