Over the years, filmmaker James Cameron has strongly hinted that the third Avatar movie will be titled Avatar: The Seed Bearer. That's one of many rumoured titles to have done the rounds after a list of them was once uncovered by eagle-eyed fans in copyright listings, but it's now widely associated with Avatar 3.
ComicBook.com (via SFFGazette.com) recently spoke with franchise producer Jon Landau at an event promoting the release of the Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora video game, confirming Cameron's Avatar: The Way of Water follow-up will not be called The Seed Bearer.
"I'm qualified to tell you that that is not the title for Avatar 3," he stated. "That's what my Wikipedia page says? That is getting changed tonight!"
We're anticipating the next chapter to explore even more of Pandora, this time shifting the focus from the planet's oceans to "Ash People" living in the volcanic parts of the sci-fi world. Back to those possible titles, though, and you'll likely recall the leaked list also including Avatar: The Tulkun Rider and Avatar: The Quest for Eywa.
Addressing the leak in 2019, Cameron said, "I can neither confirm nor deny. All right, here's what I'll tell ya. Those titles are among titles that are in consideration. And no final decisions have been made yet."
Last year, the director said this about the complicated process of creating not one, but four sequels to the original Avatar movie:
"We started the screenwriting process officially in the summer of 2013. The next few years were parallel processing on writing four films, designing every creature, every character, every vehicle, every cityscape, every biome, every habitat across those four movies."
"That same period of time was also for R&D and tech [development] to really future-proof ourselves across that whole oeuvre of films, because I’d rather stop once for a big chunk and get it all ready, and then work with a kind of rhythmic cadence forward from there where we don’t have to stop and retool at each stage of the game."
"We could probably write a book about how we figured all this stuff out, but the key to it is having a vision of what you want it to look like. That vision comes into focus, it’s not crystal clear. Trust me, you ain’t seen nothing yet."
Over the summer, we learned that Avatar 3 has been pushed back to December 19, 2025. Now, Avatar 4 moved to December 21, 2029, with Avatar 5 now pencilled in for a December 19, 2031 release.
When that fifth instalment comes out, it will have been over two decades since Avatar was released in 2009.