James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water became the biggest hit of 2022 in the tail-end of that year. The worldwide box office take certainly proved that the franchise still had legs. Even before the sci-fi epic released, Cameron revealed that principal photography had wrapped on Avatar 3 since filming back-to-back with The Way of Water, and the movie’s post-production journey was well underway. Additionally, Cameron had been shooting Avatar 4 and accounted for a break in production to allow the children in the cast to grow since the story would feature a six-year time jump.
As Sam Worthington attended the premiere for his new film, Netflix’s Lift, he revealed to People that they will resume filming for Avatar 4 sometime next month. Worthington teases, “We go back to work on it in a month and it’s big. It’s bigger than you can imagine.” Worthington will return to his Jake Sully role. However, the focus of the film is shifting to his and Neytiri’s children. This time last year, Cameron revealed the third film is told through Lo’ak’s point-of-view, “Jake was our voiceover narrator for movie one and for movie two, and we have a different narrator for each of the subsequent films. We see it through the eyes of a different character. Movie three is through Lo’ak’s eyes.”
Avatar 3‘s release was originally set for the end of this year, but the film would get delayed another year. Despite that, Cameron assures fans that the movie is on track for December of 2025. He also stated that “three is actually much more straightforward than two,” in terms of production. Cameron adds, “Two, we got hit with the pandemic in the middle of it and we were interrupted, and then we had to reboot and reboot the production and all that sort of thing. And it was a scramble to get it done.”
Meanwhile, you can catch Worthington in Netflix’s Lift, which also stars Kevin Hart, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Vincent D’Onofrio and Jean Reno. Lift lands on Netflix on January 12.