Its been quite a wild ride for James Cameron’s Avatar films, with multiple release date changes and a delay due to the coronavirus pandemic, which again caused a delay in the film’s theatrical release, there is finally some good news.
The director recently sat down with Arnold Schwarzenegger for an interview on the actor’s YouTube channel and shared some details regarding the production of the sequels, including the impact the coronavirus has had on them, and where they are currently at:
“We lost about four and a half months of production. As a result of that, we’ve rolled around one more full year for a release in December of 2022. That’s been announced already. Now that doesn’t mean I have an extra year to finish the film, because the day we deliver Avatar 2 we’ll just start working on finishing Avatar 3. So where we are right now, I’m down in New Zealand shooting. We’re shooting the remainder of the live-action. We’ve got about ten percent left to go. We’re a hundred percent complete on Avatar 2 and we’re sort of ninety-five percent complete on Avatar 3. So we’re very lucky in that we chose this as our production site years ago.”
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The Avatar sequels were the first major films to resume production in June after the industry-wide shutdown. Filming is taking place in New Zealand where the coronavirus isn’t as rampant as the U.S.
Work on the first sequel was expected to be completed by the end of 2020 for a release date of December 17, 2021. A total of four films are being worked on back-to-back and the other time frames given included Avatar 3 in December 2023, Avatar 4 in December 2025, and Avatar 5 in December 2027. The Avatar films are produced by James Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment and 21st Century Studios.
Avatar 2 is set to star Kate Winslet (Titanic), Edie Falco (Nurse Jackie), Michelle Yeoh (Crazy Rich Asians), Vin Diesel (Fast and the Furious), Oona Chaplin (Game of Thrones), Sam Worthington (Terminator Salvation), Zoe Saldana (Avengers: Endgame), Joel David Moore (Dodgeball), Dileep Rao (Inception), Stephen Lang (Don’t Breathe), Matt Gerald (Rampage), Jemaine Clement (Moana), and Sigourney Weaver (Alien).
You can stream the first Avatar film on Disney+ today.
Source: Dark Horizons
