James Cameron is ready to leave Pandora behind if Avatar: Fire and Ash doesn’t make money at the box office.
Avatar is the highest grossing movie of all time, and Avatar: The Way of Water isn’t far behind it in third place. Both movies grossed over $2 billion.
“Absolutely,” Cameron said on The Town with Matthew Belloni podcast, when asked if he was prepared to walk away from the franchise if Fire and Ash didn’t make enough money. “I’ve been in Avatar land for 20 years. Actually, 30 years, because I wrote it in ’95, right, but I wasn’t working continuously on it for those first 10 years. There was a brief flurry of interest in ’95, and then everybody said, ‘You’re out of your mind,’ and I shelved it for 10 years, and then we got serious in 2005. Yeah, absolutely. Sure, if this is where it ends, cool.”
When asked about open plot threads, Cameron responded: “There is one open thread. I’ll write a book, answer everybody’s questions.”
But, as for whether he’d hand the franchise to someone else, Cameron replied, “Absolutely not,” noting he’d always at least be on board as a producer: “I don’t think there’d ever be a version where there’s another Avatar movie that I didn’t produce closely. But in terms of it taking over my life, you know, that’s a threshold issue for me.”
Avatar: Fire and Ash is currently tracking for an impressive opening, but one slightly below The Way of Water. We’ll just have to wait and see how its numbers turn out.
Avatar 3 hits theaters on December 19. In the meantime, check out our guide to all the upcoming movies of this year and beyond for everything else that’s on the way.
