James Cameron Confirms Fans Won't See Michelle Yeoh's AVATAR Character Until at Least 2029

Director James Cameron announced five years ago that Academy Award-winning actress Michelle Yeoh (Everything Everywhere All At Once, Star Trek: Discovery) would be joining his Avatar film franchise.

We didn’t know when her character, Dr. Karina Mogue, would appear, as she wasn’t in the 2022 sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, but her name appeared in the lineup for the upcoming third film, Avatar: Fire and Ash, so it looked like we would finally see her in action.

But Cameron has now confirmed that Yeoh’s character actually won’t be in the third film either. The director told Entertainment Weekly at last weekend’s D23 convention that Yeoh is in deed not in part three, explaining ”that got a little bit misreported,” but he went on to confirm that she will be in parts four and five.

“She will be coming in soon to do her part, which is an interesting, fun character. I mean, we’re getting ahead of ourselves now.

This whole thing has been planned for years and years. The scripts were all written years ago, through the end of movie five.

So we’ve been working on parts of four even as we go along, mostly because we’ve got this young cast. We had to shoot them all while they were still young.”

The article notes that a widely circulated photo of Yeoh on set with Cameron was taken while he was shooting the second and third films back to back, along with the first part of the fourth.

Although fans won’t see Yeoh in Fire and Ash, Cameron knows it’ll be worth the wait to see her in Avatar‘s world:

“We love Michelle … She was always a movie star, but she’s blown up into a huge, huge phenomenon.”

No kidding. She finally got the Academy Award and Golden Globe that had been a long time coming, and she has a ton of projects on her slate these days, including the highly anticipated films Wicked, and Star Trek: Section 31.

I’m sure she will be great in the Avatar franchise, and I’m glad we will see plenty of her in the meantime.