Back in 2009, James Cameron’s Avatar thrilled audiences with pioneering 3-D technology, which helped to bring the sprawling, spectacular, alien world of Pandora to life. Almost immediately after the film released, we started hearing rumblings about a sequel, but here we are, almost eight years later, and still no Avatar 2.
That said, a follow-up is still very much in the works. Correction: Four follow-ups are still very much in the works. Cameron & Co. released the release dates for the films just a few months ago and they’re expected as follows: Avatar 2 (2020), Avatar 3, (2021) Avatar 4 (2024), and Avatar 5 (2025). If you’re thinking that four sequels sounds like overkill, you’re certainly not alone. In a recent interview, however, actress Sigourney Weaver sought to explain that five films is — not too many, not too few — just right.
As reported by ScreenCrush, Weaver says there is a “very good reason” to make four more Avatar films. If you’re thinking “yea, billions of dollars,” again, you’re not alone — but that’s not what the actress has in mind. Here’s a bit of what she had to say:
“There’s a very good reason why it turned out to be four sequels … Having read all four of them, I think they’re absolutely extraordinary and worth the wait.” In other words: “Trust James Cameron, this is going to be epic.”
Additionally, Weaver seems to be making news by revealing that there are, in fact, four full scripts for the four expected sequels, perhaps making it more likely that the director’s full vision will come to fruition.
Weaver also said we can expect the franchise to continue along the same arc it established with the first film and tell a story about “the peril of this beautiful planet [Pandora]” in addition to the, “… greed and callousness of the corporations and plight of the indigenous people.”
While 2020, 2021, 2024, and 2025 are all a long way away, we can’t help but daydream about the new corners of Pandora the sequels will introduce us to, and the as-of-yet uninvented technologies they may use to explore them.
Until then, stay tuned and we’ll keep you updated on any and all Avatar news.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?