AVATAR 4 and 5 Will Explore the Origins of the Avatar Program and Its Creator
It’s kind of wild when you stop and think about it. We’re several movies deep into James Cameron’s Avatar saga, we’ve watched Pandora evolve, Eywa prove she’s very real, and entire cultures collide in increasingly strange and emotional ways.
Yet one of the most important pieces of this universe has barely been touched. The Avatar Program itself. Where it came from. Who actually created it. And why that story quietly disappeared from the first film.
That long dangling thread is finally set to be pulled in Avatar 4 and Avatar 5, and the reveal traces all the way back to ideas that were cut from the original 2009 movie.
The details come from The Making of Avatar, a behind the scenes book by Joe Fordham that digs deep into the development of Avatar, Avatar: The Way of Water, and Avatar: Fire & Ash. The book shines a light on story elements Cameron had mapped out years ago but simply couldn’t fit into the first film.
At the center of it all is the Avatar Program itself. In the original movie, it’s presented as established tech, with Sigourney Weaver’s Dr. Grace Augustine clearly running the show. What the film never explains is how Grace got there, or who was responsible for creating the program in the first place. That gap wasn’t an accident.
According to Cameron, those questions were very much on his mind while developing the script. As he explained in Fordham’s book:
“When did [Grace] arrive on Pandora? Who was her mentor? How did she wind up inheriting the Avatar Program? I came up with a backstory around Grace and the guy that she wound up replacing, her mentor, the founder of the Avatar Program, Brantley Giess.”
That founder, Brantley Giess, was originally meant to be part of Avatar. He was envisioned as Grace’s mentor and the architect of the entire Avatar initiative. But as the story evolved, he vanished from the final cut.
The book explains that Cameron teamed up with Laeta Kalogridis to streamline the script during rewrites in the spring of 2006. A lot of Giess’ dialogue and narrative function was folded into Grace’s character instead.
The result was a tighter film, but it also meant removing a major piece of Pandora’s human history. Giess was gone, and most audiences never knew he existed.
That doesn’t mean Cameron forgot about him. Fordham makes it clear that this character was always meant to matter in the long run, even if his introduction had to wait. As the book notes, “Though he ultimately isn't seen in Avatar, Giess becomes an important part of the ongoing story, which will be revealed in Avatar 4 and 5.”
So, the future sequels won’t just expand Pandora visually or introduce new Na’vi cultures. They’ll also dig into the human decisions that shaped everything from the start. Understanding who created the Avatar Program and why could completely reframe Grace’s legacy and humanity’s role on Pandora.
All of this, of course, hinges on if Disney greenlights the next two films. Fire and Ash has made $1.38 billion at the box office, so chances are, they will happen, which means the creator of the Avatar Program will finally step out of the shadows.
Via: /Film