There was a 13-year gap between Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water and while we won't be waiting quite as long for the third instalment, the fourth - which has now officially started production - is still more than half a decade away.
Miles Quaritch actor Stephen Lang has taken to social media to confirm cameras are now rolling on the untitled Avatar 4, revealing that his villain will still be around by the time the events of the fourth instalment take place. In The Way of Water, we saw him have something of a crisis of conscience after discovering he had a son, suggesting Quaritch might change allegiance now his mind resides in a Na'vi body.
"Deja Blu all over again," Lang wrote, revealing a glimpse at his motion capture suit complete with a 1st Recom patch. This comes after lead star Sam Worthington recently confirmed he'd start working on the movie at the beginning of February.
"We go back to work on it in a month and it’s big. It’s bigger than you can imagine," the actor said at the time.
As for filmmaker James Cameron, his last update came our way a couple of months ago. "We did the capture on three and the live-action photography on three as an intermingled production with [Avatar: 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."
Unsurprisingly, a great deal of work on the movies has overlapped and Cameron would go on to share more about what fans can expect from 2029's Avatar 4.
"We see them and then we go away for six years and we come back," he said of the aforementioned time-jump. "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."
Last year, Avatar 3 was pushed back to December 19, 2025, with Avatar 4 later moved to December 21, 2029. That leaves Avatar 5 pencilled in for a December 19, 2031 release.
When the fifth instalment comes out, it will have been over two decades since Avatar was released way back in 2009. As far as we're aware, it's also where Cameron intends to end this story, though it's certainly possible he'll choose to make Avatar 6 at some point in the coming years should these next few instalments prove to be as successful as Avatar: The Way of Water.
Stay tuned for updates as we have them.