It's been a long time since Avatar hit theaters and broke box office records, but Disney has big plans for the franchise (no great surprise when it's such a big part of Disney World). James Cameron returned to the director's chair for the second and third movies, and there are also plans for two more instalments after that.
Talking on the Marianne Williamson Podcast (via The Playlist), the filmmaker shared some insight into making the sequels, and revealed why he initially shot down the new ideas his writers were coming up with.
"When I sat down to write the sequels, I knew there were going to be three at the time, and eventually it turned into four, I put together a group of writers and said, ‘I don’t want to hear anybody’s new ideas or anyone’s pitches until we have spent some time figuring out what worked on the first film, what connected, and why it worked," the director says in the video below.
"They kept wanting to talk about the new stories. I said, ‘We aren’t doing that yet.’ Eventually, I had to threaten to fire them all because they were doing what writers do, which is to try and create new stories. I said, ‘We need to understand what the connection was and protect it, protect that ember and that flame.’"
That does actually make some sense, though it also seems a little...unreasonable? Cameron has a reputation for not being the easiest to work with, though.
After figuring out what made that first Avatar movie resonate with moviegoers, Cameron said: "We created and rejected many storylines for the second and third film because they didn’t take us to that transportive, dreaming-with-your-eyes-wide-open feeling."
3D movies are no longer all the rage, so tapping into what worked beyond that in the 2009 movie probably isn't the worst idea. The interview below is lengthy, but well worth checking out: