By James Cameron’s currently at work, still in post-production on the third “Avatar” film “Avatar: Fire and Ash” and filming material for the fourth and fifth ones.
As part of a 2025 preview issue for Empire, Cameron spoke a bit more about the third film and more specifically the two different kinds of Na’vi we’ll see in the new film.
First is the Wind Traders, Cameron dubs them nomadic traders who are equivalent to “the camel caravans of the Spice Road back in the Middle Ages.”
He adds: “They’re just fun. Like all Na’vi, they live in a symbiosis with their creatures…If you’ve got any nautical blood in your veins, you’ll want to be on [their] ship.”
The big introduction though is the Ash Clan, led by a character named Varang played by Oona Chaplin and he describes her character:
“Varang is the leader of a people who have gone through an incredible hardship. She’s hardened by that. She will do anything for them, even things that we would consider to be evil. One thing we wanted to do in this film is not be black-and-white simplistic. We’re trying to evolve beyond the ‘all humans are bad, all Na’vi are good’ paradigm.”
Cameron adds he didn’t quite appreciate how good Chaplin’s performance was until they got the finished animation back: “She’s an enemy, an adversarial character, but [Chaplin] makes her feel so real and alive.”
He also spoke about the action and about how the film will go “places they [the audience] won’t expect, but that will feel earned,” and says there’s no point in doing these films if they aren’t going into new territory each time:
“We’ve got some really clever action set-pieces. You can get your blood up in this movie. But what excites me as an artist who recently turned 70 and has kind of done all that stuff is not only the opportunity to get to do it again, but to get to a level of character and intrigue you haven’t seen before in an Avatar movie.
We’re just starting to riff on it and twist it and turn it. It’s a tricky thing. We could be getting high on our own supply here, and everybody who looks at it goes, ‘F—, that’s not what I signed up for.’ But if you’re not making brave choices, you’re wasting everybody’s time and money. That alone is not sufficient to create success, but it’s necessary. You’ve got to break the mould every fricking time.”
As for where things stand with the third film right now, he says they’ve currently doubled the number of shots finished at this stage compared to where they were on the second movie, and the films are about equal length so “that puts us well ahead of the curve, which is something I’ve never, frankly, experienced before.”
“Avatar: Fire and Ash” will be released in U.S. cinemas on December 19th 2025.
New artwork for ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ from @EmpireMagazine.
In theaters December 19th. pic.twitter.com/Ds4fpHPkHO
— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) January 15, 2025
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