Production on James Cameron's AVATAR Sequels Have Been Suspended in New Zealand

As you know, the coronavirus pandemic has caused several TV and film productions to shut down recently. It seems like every day I wake up to the news of another production shutting down. Today, it’s been announced that the production on James Cameron’s long-in-development Avatar sequels has been suspended in New Zealand.

Producer Jon Landau told the New Zealand Herald (via Deadline):

“We’ve delayed it. We had plans to come down Friday night with a group of people and start back up and we made the decision to hold off and continue working here [Los Angeles], and come down there a little bit later than we’d planned.

“If I told you we are going to know something in two weeks I’d be lying. I might not be wrong – even a broken clock is right twice a day. But I would be lying because I don’t know…We’re in the midst of a global crisis and this is not about the film industry. I think everybody needs to do now whatever we can do, as we say here, to flatten the [coronavirus] curve.”

As filming is halted, Weta will continue to work on developing the visual effects for the film. Cameron and his team have been working on these Avatar sequels for years. The release dates are still far out enough to where I doubt that the pause on production will affect the release dates.

The Avatar sequels are bringing back the original cast members Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Joel David Moore, Dileep Rao, Stephen Lang, Sigourney Weaver, and Matt Gerald. They will be joined by the new cast members that include Kate Winslet, Edie Falco, Michelle Yeoh, Vin Diesel, Jemaine Clement, and Oona Chaplin.

It’s been explained that Avatar 2 is set several years after Avatar. “At the center of each of our four movies will be the Sully family. Each sequel will play as a standalone movie. Each movie’s story will come to its own conclusion… However, when looked at as a whole, the journey across all four movies will create an even larger connected epic saga for audiences around the world.”

When previously talking about the films, Jon Landau opened up about the setting for the sequels, saying:

“As we’ve moved on with the sequels to Avatar we made a very conscious decision to stage the whole four sequels on Pandora. We don’t need to go to another world if we want water, we’re going to go to the oceans of Pandora.

”It’s a continuation of the same characters, but what happen when warriors that are willing to go on suicide charges, and leap off cliffs on to the back of big orange toruks, what happens when they grow up and have their own kids? It becomes a very different story. Now the kids are the risk-takers and the change-makers. So, it’s interesting, but it makes sense to me. Everybody’s either a parent, or they had parents at the very least, and if you look at the big successful franchises now, they’re pretty much uninterested in that.”

It was also revealed that there are different clans of Na’vi all over Pandora:

“We’re going to go to totally different environments, we’re going to meet different cultures. Just like our planet is as diverse culturally as we are environmentally. We want to introduce people to different cultures. In the first movie, we only met the Omaticaya clan, and they are the clan here allowing us to come to the Valley of Mo’ara. But as we venture out we’re going to different environments and different clans.”

Avatar 2 is expected to release on December 17, 2021; Avatar 3 on December 2023, Avatar 4 on December 2025, and Avatar 5 on December 2027.