James Cameron has revealed that the script for the Avatar sequel was thrown out after a year of writing as he wasn't satisfied with it.
The first Avatar was in production for over 25 years before it finally hit cinemas. Cameron initially came up with the idea for the movie in 1994, but would later admit that the necessary technology to achieve his vision of the world did not even exist yet.
The plot of Avatar concerns a human colonisation of a fictional planet known as Pandora, which is healthy with a highly valuable mineral, 'unobtanium'.
Pandora's indigenous species are the Na'vi, humanoid creatures who must defend themselves against the onslaught of the humans. Sam Worthington plays a marine who is put into an avatar of one of the Na'vi in order to infiltrate the tribe.
Not only is it the highest-grossing movie of all time, but it is also one of the most expensive to have ever been made.
Avatar's success meant that a sequel was inevitable, and it will be released this December, titled Avatar: The Way of Water.
Why did the Avatar sequel take so long?
Part of the reason for the 13-year gap between the movies is that Cameron took a while to find the correct script.
"When I sat down with my writers to start Avatar 2, I said we cannot do the next one until we understand why the first one did so well. We must crack the code of what the hell happened," he said in an interview with The Times.
“All films work on different levels. The first is surface, which is character, problem and resolution. The second is thematic. What is the movie trying to say? But Avatar also works on a third level, the subconscious.
“I wrote an entire script for the sequel, read it and realised that it did not get to level three. Boom. Start over. That took a year.”
Cameron revealed in an interview in 2021 that he almost fired his team of writers for Avatar 2 as they continually pitched him new story ideas rather than focusing on the magic that led to the success of the first movie.
Watch the trailer for Avatar: The Way of Water below:
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