Avatar: Fire And Ash made a lot of money, but cost a lot money to make. As a result, the sequel is said to be in limbo while Disney crunches the numbers.
In any normal climate, a $1.4bn haul at the box office and an Oscar win for best VFX would make the greenlighting of a sequel a formality, you might think. But this is the topsy-turvy world of the Avatar franchise, where James Cameron’s visual fantasias make lots of money, but also cost huge sums to bring to the screen in the first place.
Such was the case with December’s Avatar: Fire And Ash. It made almost $1.5bn in cinemas, but its estimated cost is somewhere around $350-$400m – with a further $150m spent on marketing.
The third film in Cameron’s long-running saga, Fire And Ash was set to pave the way for Avatars 4 and 5, pencilled in for release in 2029 and 2031 respectively. Recent months have seen a gradual shift in the way Cameron has talked about his sci-fi fantasies, however; in December, he talked about other projects, including a proposed Terminator reboot and a historical drama about the bombing of Hiroshima.
He was even more vague in March, when he said backstage at the Saturn Awards, “To be perfectly clear, we haven’t even made a decision if we’re going forward right now. But should I do that – I’d say that’s likely but not 100% – but we will learn from lessons from all three films.”
That quote comes via The Wrap’s Drew Taylor, who’s written a lengthy report about Avatar 4’s clouded status.
The short version of that report is that, while the Avatar films have been a cash juggernaut for its owners at Disney, the box office numbers have been trending down over each successive release.
If a fourth Avatar is going to happen, insiders suggest that it’ll need to have a lower budget than Fire And Ash and be less interminably long – the third chapter had a runtime of 197 minutes.
One point of comparison at Disney appears to be Zootropolis 2 (aka Zootopia 2). The animated comedy cost less than Fire And Ash ($150m) and made more money (over $1.8bn). With this in mind, the Mouse House is said to be rethinking its plans to build an Avatar-themed attraction in California, and is instead considering making it a Zootopia-styled destination instead.
Despite all this, producer Rae Sanchini is still bullish that the two Avatar sequels will still happen – “As far as we’re concerned, we’re full speed ahead,” she told Inverse. The question, for now, is whether Cameron can find ways to realise his widescreen epics without spending the huge sums of their predecessors.
More on this as we get it.