Avatar 3 will present a MAJOR shift for the franchise

James Cameron says Avatar 3 will be more character-focused than the first two movies.

The first Avatar remains the highest-grossing movie in history, while Avatar: The Way of Water made a cool $2.3 billion on its own.

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Huge praise has been sent Cameron's way for his innovative CGI used in both movies, though both have also received criticism for the thin plots and lack of character development.

That will be addressed in Avatar 3, however.

“The big advance in this movie is just going to be greater character depth," Cameron told GQ.

"We're seeing new cultures, new creatures—all the same stuff you'd expect from an Avatar movie, but the whole idea of this cycle of films is to live with these people and go on this epic journey with them.

"So I think it's not about, ‘We're going to show you the best water (VFX) ever done’—but you get more into the heart and soul of the characters. And there's some very interesting new characters that come in as well. This is a journey over time. It will play out through movie three, into movie four and movie five. There's an epic cycle to the whole thing.”

3.94 (8042)

Avatar (2009)

Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a paralyzed war veteran in the future who is taken to the moon Pandora with several others. Humanity wants to extract valuable raw materials from the ground there. However, this planet is inhabited by the Na'vi, a human-like race with their own language and culture. The Na'vi do everything they can to protect themselves from the humans. Sully becomes involved in their freedom struggle, and also falls in love with one of them...

Directed by: James Cameron
Stars: Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver and Zoe Saldana

Avatar 4 to jump in time

In an interview with People, Cameron revealed that the fourth Avatar movie will jump forward in time by six years.

“We did the (motion) capture on three and the live-action photography on three as an intermingled production with The Way of Water, and we even did part of movie four because our young characters are all going to have a big time jump in movie four," he explained.

“We see them and then we go away for six years and we come back. And so the part where we come back is the part we haven’t shot yet. So we’ll start on that after three is released.”