Avatar 2: James Cameron shares new set-photos and concept art

James Cameron’s Avatar sequels have been a long time coming. The original film was released in 2009 and wound up grossing a record-breaking $2.8 billion worldwide. It didn’t take long before a series of sequels were announced and James Cameron recently spoke with Entertainment Weekly about the crazy journey it took to bring Avatar 2 to life.

After spending so many years researching new technologies and shooting, we’re still a full year away from the release of Avatar 2, and James Cameron is the first to admit that it’s “kind of nuts,” saying that “if Avatar hadn’t made so much damn money, we’d never do this — because it’s kind of crazy.” James Cameron shared a handful of photos from the set of Avatar 2 as well as a piece of concept art, all of which you can check out below.

If you couldn’t tell by all the giant water tanks (a 900,000-gallon tank was built specifically for the production), a great deal of Avatar 2 and 3 will be taking place in and around Pandora’s ocean. Shooting in actual water tanks proved to be a challenge as the performance capture process that was used on the first Avatar movie didn’t work underwater. A new method of underwater motion capture was developed, but James Cameron said that his colleagues were really pushing for them to shoot those scenes “dry for wet” with the actors hanging on wires.

I said, ‘It’s not going to work. It’s not going to look real.’ I even let them run a test, where we captured dry for wet, and then we captured in water, a crude level of our in-water capture. And it wasn’t even close.

At the end of the day, James Cameron always gets his way. Set 14 years after the events of the first film, Avatar 2 will find Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) having started a family, but when the Resources Development Administration (RDA) returns to Pandora, the family is forced to flee to the reef. Despite James Cameron’s confidence in the world he’s created, he’s all too aware of just how much the theatrical landscape has changed since the release of the first film. “The big issue is: Are we going to make any damn money?” Cameron said. “Big, expensive films have got to make a lot of money. We’re in a new world post-COVID, post-streaming. Maybe those [box office] numbers will never be seen again. Who knows? It’s all a big roll of the dice.”

Avatar 2 will hit theaters on December 16, 2022, followed by Avatar 3 on December 20, 2023, Avatar 4 on December 18, 2026, and Avatar 5 on December 22, 2028.