For better or worse, filmmaker James Cameron has decided to devote the remainder of his career to the Avatar franchise. The Terminator and Aliens director will release the third chapter, Fire and Ash, next month, and he has plans for at least two more sequels.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In 2009, Avatar broke box office records by grossing over $2 billion. Much to the surprise of many box office pundits, Avatar: The Way of Water did the same thing, but will the third time be a charm for Cameron?<\/p>\n
If not, he’s\u00a0willing to walk away from the franchise…and the director won’t be passing the reins to anyone else.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I\u2019ve been in ‘Avatar’\u00a0land for 20 years, actually 30 years, because I wrote it in 1995, but I wasn\u2019t working continuously on it for those first ten years,” Cameron told Matthew Belloni (via SFFGazette.com<\/a>). “There was a brief flurry of interest in ’95, and then everybody said, ‘You\u2019re out of your mind,’\u00a0and I shelved it for ten years. And then we got serious in 2005.”<\/p>\n “Yeah, absolutely. Sure,” he\u00a0said, addressing the possibility of Fire and Ash being where the Avatar story concludes. “If this is where it ends, cool. There is one open thread. I\u2019ll write a book. I\u2019ll answer everybody\u2019s question[s].”<\/p>\n Pushed on whether he’d consider\u00a0letting anyone continue the\u00a0Avatar franchise, Cameron replied, “Absolutely not. Look, I have choices there. There are levels in which I [can] immerse. I don\u2019t think there\u2019d ever be a version where there\u2019s another ‘Avatar’\u00a0movie that I didn\u2019t produce closely.”<\/p>\n Regardless of how Avatar: Fire and Ash fares at the box office next month, Cameron has “ten other projects” in the pipeline and may helm one of those next.\u00a0Ghosts of Hiroshima has been named as a possibility by the trades, but the filmmaker isn’t so sure.\u00a0<\/p>\n “That one [‘Ghosts’] just hit the headlines briefly because of the book announcement and trying to push the book to bestseller because the author is a friend of mine,” he noted. “It doesn\u2019t mean I\u2019m not going to make the film, but I haven\u2019t written the script, and it\u2019s not slated, and I don\u2019t even have a distribution partner on it. It\u2019s a pretty vaporware project right now.”<\/p>\n