A listing on Production Weekly has James Cameron’s “Avatar 5” starting production in 2026. If that’s case, dreadful news.
I guess the only way ‘Avatar 5’ can meet its intended release date is if it shoots as soon as possible. Cameron recently confirmed that a big chunk of that movie would be set on earth and not Pandora.
‘Avatar 4’ technically started production around 2022, and there’s been a fair amount of progress on that one. I wouldn’t be surprised if much of the live-action scenes have already been shot by now.
I was hoping Cameron would bank on his promise to shoot “Last Train to Hiroshima” in between ‘Avatar’ movies, but when exactly would he have the time to do that?
‘Hiroshima’ was supposed to be Cameron’s first non-Avatar film since 1997’s “Titanic.” Last September, Cameron had officially purchased the rights to Charles Pellegrino’s book “Ghosts of Hiroshima.” The film would follow a man who survived the atomic blast at Hiroshima, got on a train to Nagasaki and then survived a nuclear explosion in that city as well.
Cameron would be using ‘Ghosts’, and Pellegrino’s 2015 book ‘Last Train From Hiroshima’, as the source material for his film version.
Cameron, 70, started working on the first “Avatar” movie in 1999. From a filmmaking standpoint, it’s all he’s been concentrating on since then. Cameron has almost exclusively, with the exception of a few docs he’s made, only worked on ‘Avatar’ for the last 30 years.
I’m not saying it was a waste of time, Cameron seems genuinely passionate about these movies and, they’ve been incredibly successful endeavors. However, from an artistic point of view, and as someone who was thrilled to no ends by Cameron’s visual miracles in “The Terminator,” “T2,” “Aliens,” and “Titanic,” I can’t help but hope that ‘Hiroshima’ comes sooner rather than later.
Edward Berger seems to have settled on what comes next. His Lance Armstrong biopic, starring Austin Butler, is now holding casting calls, with production eyed for January.