Back in September,James Cameronadmitted that he wrote and scrapped a completeAvatarsequel script. In the new editionof Total Film (via Games Radar), Cameron explained a little more about the original sequel plan forAvatarand why he decided to abandon a 130-page script and a year’s worth of work to start all over again.
It is clear that James Cameron wants to do hisAvatarmovies in a certain way to get them exactly how he wants them. It seems that even includes the scrapping of a completed script for a sequel entitledAvatar: The High Ground, despite it being over 130-pages long and being what Cameron described as “a hell of a read.” However, as he detailed, some elements just didn’t sit with his vision for the franchise. He said:
“We were noodling around. I was working with a team of writers. We had a lot of ideas. We kept trying to corral it into a box, and it never quite fit. So at a certain point, I said, ‘I’ll just finish it, and see if it’s a movie.’ I did. It came out, I think, at 130 pages. It was like, ‘Man, this is a great story. This is a hell of a read.’ But it was missing one of those critical elements about sequels, which is that it didn’t go enough into the unexpected. It also didn’t play enough by Avatar rules, which is to connect us to the dream world, that which has a spiritual component that we can’t even quite quantify in words. It ticked every other box, but it didn’t tick that one.”
Related:James Cameron Has a Plan if Avatar: The Way of Water Bombs
What Happened to James Cameron’s ScrappedAvatarSequel?
AlthoughAvatar: The Way of Wateris a completely different movie from the one James Cameron originally wrote, the work onAvatar: The High Ground’sabandoned script was not all in vain. The director continued to say:
“We figured out a way to restructure the elements that we needed to distribute across the first two of the sequels, and relaunched it in a completely different way. There’s some great stuff in it. I mean, you’ve got the Na’vi fighting with bows and arrows in zero-G. I mean, I’m there! I want to see that movie. But it just didn’t achieve enough of the overall story and thematic goals that I had in mind. So we’re turning it into a Dark Horse graphic novel. You’ll be able to see that interim battle that took place between movie one and movie two.”
Fans of theAvatarfranchise can get their hands on the graphic novel from December 6, ten days beforeAvatar: The Way of Wateropens in cinemas. Regardless of how popular the book release is, the belated sequel to the biggest movie of all time is expected to end the year with a bang at the box office and could be the only movie with a chance of dethroningTop Gun: Maverickat the top of the 2022 chart of highest grossing films.
