Forget Avatar 2 – James Cameron is already planning Avatar 6 and 7

Avatar 2 is about to hit cinemas, but James Cameron’s Pandora journey is far from over – he’s already got ideas for Avatar 6 and 7. Yes, really.

James Cameron hasn’t directed a movie for 13 years. Avatar, released in 2009, remains the box office king of the world to this day, still the highest-grossing movie of all time and unlikely to ever be fully dethroned.

The greatest tragedy of Cameron’s investment in Avatar isn’t the movies themselves (people love to hate Avatar, despite it being widely beloved): it’s the fact the director hasn’t used his talent for anything else.

Lest we forget, Cameron has directed The Terminator, Terminator 2, Aliens, True Lies, and The Abyss. Alas, don’t get your hopes up for something else anytime soon – he’s already looking beyond Avatar 2 and the sequels we know.

Avatar 6 and 7 are already in the works, according to James Cameron

In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Cameron spoke about his wide-ranging plans for the franchise after Avatar 2. While there is some doubt over whether we’ll see Avatar 4 and 5, he’s already planning the sixth and seventh entries – if people want them, that is.

“I’d be 89 by then. Obviously, I’m not going to be able to make Avatar movies indefinitely, the amount of energy required,” he said.

“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.”

Cameron thinks he “may have five or six more movies in him and that three of them, probably, would be Avatar movies,” the outlet wrote.

This comes after he revealed Avatar 4 and 5 – titled Avatar: The Tulkun Rider and Avatar: The Quest for Eywa, as per BBC News – may be axed if The Way of Water doesn’t make enough money; somewhere in the region of $2 billion, to be more precise.

While some have suggested transferring the world of Avatar to television, Cameron doesn’t want to. “The problem with these CG characters is that they’re so cost- and labor-intensive that it really doesn’t work for TV,” he 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.”

Avatar 2 will hit cinemas on December 16, 2022. You can find out more about the movie here.