What shocks me mostly here is that I thought that
4 and
5's live action production had actually already begun. Guess not.
Cameron could end up pulling an Original Trilogy-George Lucas and doling out the last two while heavily supervising and running the show (he already kind of did that with
Alita: Battle Angel and
Terminator: Dark Fate in 2019), but honestly, I expect that he does end up being the one to direct them, given the way he's talking about
4 in that interview and his immediate backtracking on his statement.
It is interesting that he's already thinking about his post-
Avatar career and other stories that he still has in him that he wants to tell.
EDIT: Just went back and dug up this relevant Cameron quote from late last year:
QuoteWe mixed the schedules for 2 and 3 together, based on the types of scenes and the environments. I said, let's just treat it like it's a six-hour miniseries and we're only going to go to Frankfurt once. We're going to shoot all the scenes from 2 and 3 at the same time. That was more or less the motif. Actor availability was an issue as well. Anything that had to be done with a specific actor, we did all the scenes for 2 and 3 together — and a little bit of 4. Because once again, I had to shoot the kids out. They're allowed to age six years in the middle of the story on page 25 of movie 4. So I needed everything before then, and then everything after, we'll do later.
So there has been a bit of production on
4, but then they stopped after shooting the ~25 pages or so and have not yet picked up on any more of
4 or any of
5 at all. Makes sense.
