For decades, James Cameron has been working on building the world of Avatar, a franchise that he certainly knows better than anyone else. Cameron wrote the first draft of Avatar in 1994, and this lush world he’s created will be even further explored in Avatar: The Way of Water, and the multiple planned sequels. While this series of films will certainly expand what we know about this universe, Cameron knows so much about this series that Cameron has even written a script tying together the first and second films that we will never see.
In an interview with Collider’s Perri Nemiroff, Sam Worthington (Jake Sully) and Zoe Saldaña (Neytiri) discussed this full script that Cameron showed them to help fill in the gaps of the events between Avatar and The Way of Water. When asked if they had smaller backstory details or experiences that they came up with to inform their performances in the movies, Worthington replied, “Jim [Cameron] gave us a script of 1.5 that he wrote that shows the time between Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water, and he wrote a full script.”
Worthington continued on to explain that Cameron gave it to him and said, “‘Look, read this. We’ll fill in the blanks of what Jake’s been doing.’ I said, ‘When do we shoot this one? Because this is amazing.’ He goes, ‘No, no, that’s just something I wrote over the past year to give you his backstory.’”
While The Way of Water does give audiences an idea of what has happened between the two films, especially Jake and Neytiri raising their four children, and their life after fighting the humans, it sounds as though Cameron has an entire film’s worth of material that we might never see. Considering The Way of Water takes place over a decade after Avatar, there are several films worth of stories to be told, and who knows if Cameron will ever find a reason to release this script to the public.
Worthington continued to say that he lent the script to Zoe, who says “It was amazing.” Worthington says that he thinks Zoe lost the script, to which she said, “No, I have it,” and stated, “I just never returned it. I was like, ‘I’m keeping this.’”
Even if we never see this Avatar 1.5 (leak the script, Saldaña!), there’s still plenty of Avatar to come. After the release of The Way of Water, Avatar 3 is scheduled to be released on December 18, 2026, with Avatar 4 planned for December 22, 2028. Beyond that, Cameron is also hoping to make Avatar 5, although that will likely depend on the success of the first three sequels. But if these sequels do as well as the first film, maybe Avatar 1.5 could get made in some capacity as well.
Avatar: The Way of Water comes to theaters on December 16. Watch the most recent trailer below and stay tuned for our full interview later this week: