James Cameron threatened to fire the writers of the Avatar sequels.
In an interview with the Times UK, Cameron revealed that when he and his team sat down to create the sequels, he said that he wanted them to figure out just why the first one was such a massive success and to put off plotting until they knew. That meant Cameron didn't want any new pitches or ideas about the sequels without that information. "When I sat down to write the sequels," he explained, "I knew there were going to be three at the time and eventually it turned into four, I put together a group of writers and said, 'I don't want to hear anybody's new ideas or anyone's pitches until we have spent some time figuring out what worked on the first film, what connected, and why it worked. They kept wanting to talk about the new stories. I said, 'We aren’t doing that yet.' Eventually I had to threaten to fire them all because they were doing what writers do, which is to try and create new stories. I said, 'We need to understand what the connection was and protect it, protect that ember and that flame.'"
As for what they figured out, Cameron noted that Avatar worked on three different levels. "The first is surface, which is character, problem and resolution," he explained. "The second is thematic. What is the movie trying to say? But Avatar also works on a third level, the subconscious. I wrote an entire script for the sequel, read it and realized that it did not get to level three. Boom. Start over. That took a year."
What We Know About Avatar's Future
The original Avatar released in 2009 and explored a conflict between humans colonizing the alien world of Pandora and the Na'Vi, the planet's inhabitants. Commercially, the movie -- which was groundbreaking for the time in terms of 3D technology -- was a massive success and has, as of writing, earned more than $2.84 billion worldwide across various releases, making it the highest-grossing movie ever.
The success of the original movie resulted in several sequels getting greenlit. However, production on those movies has been slow. At the time of writing, there are four Avatar sequels in some stage of production, with Cameron having already started filming on the fourth entry in the series.
The next Avatar movie to release will be The Way of Water. At the time of writing, plot details about the movie are scarce, though it will be set a decade after the original film and continue to tell the story of the Sully family. Sigourney Weaver will play Kiri in the film, while Stephen Lang is expected to reprise his role as Colonel Miles Quaritch. Initially, it was unclear just how his character, who died at the end of Avatar, could return, but Lang revealed in July that he'll have a Na'vi body rather than a human one.
Avatar: The Way of Water is set to release on Dec. 16.