James Cameron wants to explore Avatar character backstories and moments between movies with an animated anthology series, and maybe even an animated film: "You could go anywhere you want"
Avatar director James Cameron wants to make an animated anthology series that fills in some of the gaps between the franchise's movies, and he's already pitched it to Disney.
"I said, 'Look, I want to do an animated anthology series that's essentially in the world, but stories that you wouldn't have expected from that world'", Cameron told Empire. "There might even be an animated feature in there – it might be a feature for streaming, or a theatrical feature."
He continued, "A good early example is The Animatrix, where they went afield in the Matrix world. These are all great examples for how we can add texture and baroque detail to the world of Avatar."
The first Avatar movie was released in 2009 and a sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, followed in 2022. The series is set on the fictional moon of Pandora, inhabited by the Na'vi, which is being mined for a valuable mineral by human colonizers in order to fuel a dying planet Earth. Sam Worthington stars as Jake Sully, a human who chooses to permanently stay in his Na'vi avatar after falling in love with the Na'vi princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), and the pair are raising a family in The Way of Water.
Cameron said the animated stories could deliver "backstory on characters and tangential stuff that happened off-camera within the movies. Who first landed on Pandora? The first expedition. You could go anywhere you want."
"We haven't done much with that yet," he added. "We're still gathering our stories and that sort of thing, and I've got to find the boutique filmmakers, the animators, that want to do it."
Avatar 3, officially titled Avatar: Fire and Ash, is on the way, which sees Jake and Neytiri face new obstacles after settling with the coastal-dwelling Metkayina clan: the Ash People, an aggressive Na'vi tribe led by Varang (Oona Chaplin) – and allied with Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang).
Avatar: Fire and Ash arrives in theaters on December 19. In the meantime, check out our guide to this year's other biggest upcoming movies.
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