James Cameron Wants Future AVATAR Movies Made Faster and Cheaper: “That’s My Metric”

After years of pushing filmmaking technology to its limits, James Cameron might finally be ready to change the game for the Avatar franchise in a way fans probably didn’t expect.

Following reports that Disney wants future Avatar sequels to be “cheaper and shorter,” many assumed that would eventually lead to some kind of clash between the filmmaker and the studio. Instead, Cameron sounds completely on board with finding a new approach for Pandora’s future.

Avatar: Fire and Ash pulled in an impressive $1.4 billion worldwide when it hit theaters last December, but compared to the massive hauls of the first two movies, Disney reportedly viewed the performance as softer than expected. The original Avatar still sits at around $2.9 billion globally, while Avatar: The Way of Water brought in roughly $2.3 billion.

The issue isn’t that Fire and Ash flopped. It didn’t. The problem is the gigantic price tag attached to these films. The third movie reportedly cost around $350 million to produce, with another $150 million spent on marketing. That’s an enormous gamble even for a franchise as huge as Avatar.

Recent reports claimed Disney has been discussing ways to make future installments less expensive and potentially shorter in runtime to reduce the financial risk. Now Cameron has addressed those conversations directly.

“You know, I’ll be doing some writing. I’ve got a number of projects that I’m cooking,” Cameron told Empire. “And 'Avatar 4' and '5' are still floating out there. We’re going to be looking at some new technologies to try to do them more efficiently. Because they’re hideously expensive and take a long time.”

Then he added: “I want to do them in half the time for two-thirds of the cost. That’s my metric, and so it’s going to take us a year or so to figure out how to do that.”

That doesn’t sound like a filmmaker preparing to walk away from Disney and this franchise at all. If anything, it sounds like Cameron sees this as a new creative challenge.

Of course, this probably means fans should prepare for more waiting. Avatar 4 is currently dated for December 21, 2029, but with Cameron rethinking how these films are made, that release date feels far from guaranteed.

What makes the situation even more interesting is that a chunk of the next movie has already been shot. Reports previously claimed that around 22% of Avatar 4 is already completed.

Cameron also brought in a larger creative team for the upcoming sequels, with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver helping shape the second and third films, while Josh Friedman and Shane Salerno worked on the fourth and fifth chapters.

Even with all that groundwork laid out, it sounds like Cameron is reassessing the future of the franchise from the ground up.

And apparently these next films could look very different tonally. Earlier reports claimed the upcoming installments are “said to be as radically different from Avatar: Fire and Ash as Star Wars was from The Empire Strikes Back.”

Cameron has also been surprisingly candid about the uncertain future of Avatar as a whole. Last year, he admitted the franchise could potentially end sooner than expected depending on audience interest.

“This can be the last one. There’s only one [unanswered question] in the story. We may find that the release of Avatar 3 proves how diminished the cinematic experience is these days, or we may find it proves the case that it’s as strong as it ever was — but only for certain types of films.”

He continued: “It’s a coin toss right now. We won’t know until the middle of January. I feel I’m at a bit of a crossroads. Do I want it to be a wild success — which almost compels me to continue and make two more Avatar movies? Or do I want it to fail just enough that I can justify doing something else?”

That’s an interesting mindset coming from a filmmaker who built one of the biggest movie franchises in history. Cameron clearly still loves Pandora, but he also sounds aware that the movie industry is shifting fast, and gigantic blockbuster budgets may not be sustainable forever.

Whether audiences are ready for a leaner version of Avatar remains to be seen, but Cameron trying to crack the code on making these films faster and cheaper could end up being just as important to Hollywood as the movies themselves.