It’s been over a decade since the original Avatar came out, breaking records and setting up what was meant to be a long-running franchise. With so much time in between the original and the planned sequels, is there any way what’s coming can possibly live up, not just to the original, but to the hype surrounding the property? There’s no clear answer to this question, but the world the sequels – four of them, to be exact – will be released into looks very different from the world the first Avatar movie was released in, back in 2009.
The nearly $3 billion the movie made in its theatrical run always made a sequel more than likely, but no one expected the wait to be as long as it ended up being. Part of the delay can be chalked up to the pandemic, as Avatar 2 had an original release date of December 2020. But that would have still made it more than a decade between films, and in an entertainment world where multiple Marvel characters have appeared in at least 6 movies in that span, that feels more like a century. By the time these movies end up coming out, fans will need a re-watch of the original just to remember the story they’re meant to be following.
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But the movies are still coming. They even have official titles. The second one will be Avatar: The Way of the Water, while the third movie will be Avatar: The Seed Bearer, the fourth Avatar: The Tulkin Rider and the fifth and last one, Avatar: The Quest for Eywa. They also have release dates. As of now, the second movie is slated for a December 16, 2022 release, with the other three movies following also in December but in 2024 for the third one, 2026 for the fourth one, and 2028 for the final one.
A large part of the sequels has already been filmed – the cast started work on movie two and three, which were shot simultaneously, in 2017. James Cameron himself confirmed in September of last year that movies 2 and 3 were almost done with production. The movies, of course, require heavy visual effects, and the pandemic hasn’t made that part of the process easier. But all information points out to at least the release dates for the first of the sequels staying on track. This means during the next year, fans should start getting promotional material and information about the movie itself.
This is especially important as fans have somewhat kept the hype up for a decade with very little to go on. The long wait has punctured enthusiasm, as fans have simply moved on to other properties, but it’s done little to temper expectations. A sequel to Avatar was always going to have big shoes to fill, but the shoes have gotten impossibly bigger during the last ten years. This would be somewhat manageable if Avatar was only competing with itself, but at this point, the movie is also competing with the expectations other franchises have managed to surpass – or, in some cases, the expectations other projects have fallen short of.
Avengers: Endgame, for example, is arguably a well-received end to a decade of movies for Marvel. The movie has some continuity issues, and has raised some problems for Marvel going forward, but most fans still appreciate its scope and the story it attempted to tell. Marvel has also branched out to TV in a way no one could have imagined ten years ago, with WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and now Loki basically upping the ante every week. Star Wars, on the other hand, has had to dial back its plans for more movies after the lukewarm reception to the sequel trilogy in general. The franchise isn’t dead, with a veritable hit in The Mandalorian tv show, and a new renewed focus on fan-favorite characters like Obi-Wan Kenobi, but the scope has been somewhat limited by the sequel trilogy falling short of expectations.
This is the entertainment landscape Avatar is walking into, as it attempts to establish a multi-billion-dollar movie series. Unlike the Marvel or Star Wars projects, the Avatar sequels are designed to all be standalones, following different adventures within the world of Pandora – and perhaps, beyond that moon. This might help the franchise course-correct in case one of the movies falls short of expectations. But the fact that the movies were written, conceived, and filmed in a vacuum, with very little in the way of feedback from the fans, still puts the entire thing on shaky ground where expectations are concerned. The hype is real, and it’s been building for over a decade.
In a way, Avatar can’t win. But it also looks like it can’t really lose at this point either. Fans want more content in the Avatar world, and more content is coming. That’s the good news. Whether the content is what people want, or what people expected, is a different matter altogether.