Worthington says the franchise is built for risk

Sam Worthington thinks Avatar has one major advantage over other mega-franchises: it is not being squeezed by the usual studio and fan expectations that come with a billion-dollar machine. Speaking to The Independent, the actor said James Cameron’s series operates with a level of creative freedom that is rare in modern Hollywood.

“We’re unlike Marvel movies, in the sense of… it feels like an independent movie when we make it,” Worthington said. “We don’t have outside pressures, or expectations from the press, or the studio, or the community. It doesn’t affect what we do. And that’s why we can take more risks.”

That is a fairly generous way to describe a franchise that has already grossed $6.7 billion worldwide across three films, but the numbers do back up the claim that Cameron is playing in a different commercial lane. The 2009 original remains the highest-grossing film of all time, and 2022’s The Way of Water sits at No. 3 on that list.

No deadline panic, at least not in public

Worthington also pushed back on the idea that Cameron runs his sets like a military operation. According to him, the production environment is less about pressure and more about experimentation.

“It’s not like we have to get scenes completed by today or the studio is going to be upset. We just play and create. People don’t understand that,” he said, adding that the common image of Cameron as a hard-driving tyrant does not match his experience. “They think it’s this big solid machine where Jim is the didactic director. And he’s not. He’s a painter.”

That is a poetic image, and also one that would probably be very hard to sell to anyone looking at a release calendar.

The future of the franchise is still tied to money

The most recent Avatar film, Fire & Ash, opened in theaters last December and went on to make $1.4 billion worldwide. By ordinary franchise standards, that is an absurdly good result. By Avatar standards, it represented a noticeable drop from the previous installment, which prompted fresh questions about whether Cameron will actually get to make the final two planned sequels.

Disney still has Avatar 4 and Avatar 5 on its release calendar for Dec. 21, 2029, and Dec. 19, 2031. Cameron, however, has been clear that those films depend on whether the franchise continues to justify its own existence, financially speaking, which is a refreshing bit of honesty from a studio ecosystem that usually prefers more mist and fewer numbers.

Before Fire & Ash opened, Cameron told EW, “I don’t know if the saga goes beyond this point. I hope it does,” he said. “But, you know, we prove that business case every time we go out… If we don’t get to make 4 and 5, for whatever reason, I’ll hold a press conference and I’ll tell you what we were gonna do. How’s that?”

He also said one fallback option would be to novelize the scripts for the next two films. “There’s so much culture and backstory and lateral detail in these characters that’s been worked out. I’d love to do something that’s at that level of granular detail,” Cameron said.

Cameron says the next chapter still needs to earn its way

Around the same time, Cameron told Variety that it was too early to get ahead of the franchise’s future. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” he said when asked about Avatar 4. “We’ve got to make some money with this one. Every time we go out, we have to prove this crazy business case yet again. The world has changed. We all know the stats, where theatrical is. It’s been a bad year. It’s starting to perk up a little bit with a couple of recent releases: ‘Wicked: For Good’ has done well, and ‘Zootopia 2’ is doing well. So, we’ll see.”

For now, then, Avatar remains the rare franchise where the filmmaker can talk like an artist and the studio still has to keep an eye on the receipts. Everyone else in Hollywood, naturally, is taking notes.