Jon Landau Talks About the AVATAR Sequels Including Why They Took So Long
Jon Landau has been going around to promote Alita: Battle Angel and that means everyone is asking him questions about the Avatar sequels. /Film had the chance to talk to Landau and asked him about the long break and making the film big while staying on Pandora. Landau explained that the cultural landscape hasn’t influenced the sequels, it simply took a long time because James Cameron didn’t want to rush things.
“You know, we don’t have to think about the cultural landscape [how it’s changed since the first movie]; we have to think about the script and the storytelling. There were many years between Star Wars [movies], initially. Not the first movie, but after that. We’re making standalone movies that will stand alone.
What we learned about the response to Avatar: people want to return to the world of Pandora, and they want to spend more time with Jake and Neytiri. Rather than rushing into doing the sequels, because Jim doesn’t rush it, we have to build our foundation, and that’s the scripts. Knowing that we wanted to tell multiple stories, we didn’t want to just solve one script, we wanted to solve the scripts for all of the movies we wanted to make before we ventured out to making them, that’s what took us the time.”
Landau also believes that fans are just as excited now as they were 10 years ago to go to Pandora. Especially since they plan on exploring the vast world that Pandora has to offer with different Na’vi cultures and different environments.
“I believe what’s going to happen is people are going to return to the world because the scripts Jim has delivered, they deliver on the promise created by the first movie: where we’re going to go, both in terms of the environment and the emotional story with the characters.
We made a decision for the sequels not to do necessarily what other science-fiction movies do, which is if they want water, they go to the ocean planet, and if they want snow, they go to the ice planet. We looked at all the wonders the Earth shows us, and we realized we could travel our whole lives and not see all the true wonders Earth has, so Jim made the decision to set the sequels all on Pandora. Our stories introduce to us different environments, and also different cultures.
Again, on Earth, we have a diversity of cultures. By exposing not just one Na’vi clan, but different clans as we move into the sequels, that are different. It’s not that they just go to different places. If you live somewhere else, culturally, you’re going to be different. How does that play out amongst people – getting along, dealing with each other, what type of conflicts it creates, and all of that.”
Avatar 2 is currently slated for release on December 18, 2020.
