Director James Cameron recently said on The Empire Film Podcast that he wants to make the next two Avatar sequels in a much shorter time frame and with a much smaller budget.
“You know, I’m going to be writing. I’ve got some projects in the works,” Cameron explained. “And Avatar 4 and 5 are still floating around there. We’re going to look at some new technologies to run them more efficiently, because they’re horribly expensive and take a long time. I want to run them at two-thirds the cost and in half the time. That’s my metric. And it will take us about a year to figure out how to make that happen.”
“Avatar” is the only series in which all films have surpassed the coveted $1 billion mark at the worldwide box office. The original 2009 version grossed $2.7 billion in its first run. Its sequel, “The Way of Water,” earned $2.4 billion, and last year’s “Fire and Ash” earned $1.48 billion. Prime Minister David Cameron is likely to be refining his approach in response to the fall in ‘fire and ashes’. While $1.48 billion would be a lifetime record for most other studios, Disney would have hoped that Fire and Ash’s box office receipts would be closer to its predecessor, especially given its $400 million budget and global marketing campaign that likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars more.
Cameron told Entertainment Weekly in December 2026 that if Disney decides to end the sci-fi saga after Fire and Ash, he would hold a press conference to reveal plot details for Avatar 4 and Avatar 5.
“I don’t know if the story will go beyond this point. I hope it will,” Prime Minister David Cameron said. “But, you know, we prove that business case every time we go out… If for some reason we don’t get 4 and 5, we’ll call a press conference and explain what we were going to do. How do you like it?”
