James Cameron is gearing up for the release of his highly anticipated science fiction epic ‘Avatar: The Way of Water‘. A sequel to his 2009 blockbuster, this film was in the making for more than a decade. The film is slated to hit the theaters on December 16 this year.
However, there was one sequel that the 68-year-old filmmaker cancel. Titled ‘Avatar: The High Ground‘, Cameron wrote the script and later abandon it to focus on a different story. Let’s find out the reason behind such a move and if we will get to see that story getting made.
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James Cameron Canceled An ‘Avatar’ Sequel
Cameron has been working relentlessly on the ‘Avatar‘ films since the mid-2000s. After the success of the first film, he has five planned sequels. One of them will be releasing this December.
However, the director spent an entire year writing an ‘Avatar‘ sequel that he ended up abandoning. In September, the ‘Aliens‘ director revealed the film was titled ‘Avatar: The Higher Ground.’
In an interview with Total Film magazine, Cameron said: “I was working with a team of writers. We had a lot of ideas. We kept trying to corral it into a box and it never quite fit.”
He continued, “So at a certain point, I said, ‘I’ll just finish it, and see if it’s a movie.’ I did. It came out, I think, at 130 pages. It was like, ‘Man, this is a great story. This is a hell of a read.’”
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Cameron Explained The Reason To Cancel That Script
The writer-director said he had to axe that script because “it was missing one of those critical elements about sequels, which is that it didn’t go enough into the unexpected.”
“It also didn’t play enough by ‘Avatar’ rules, which is to connect us to the dream world, that which has a spiritual component that we can’t even quite quantify in words. It ticked every other box, but it didn’t tick that one.”
However, Jim and his team took the elements of that script and put them throughout the sequel that did end up being filmed, ‘Avatar: The Way of Water.’ “There’s some great stuff in it,” Cameron said.
“I mean, you’ve got the Na’vi fighting with bows and arrows in zero-G. I mean, I’m there! I want to see that movie. But it just didn’t achieve enough of the overall story and thematic goals that I had in mind. So we’re turning it into a Dark Horse graphic novel. You’ll be able to see that interim battle that took place between movie one and movie two,” he concluded.
