The thirteen-year journey to Avatar: The Way of Water is nearly over. During that time, James Cameron has been developing multiple sequels to 2009’s Avatar, the highest-grossing movie of all-time. It didn’t all go smoothly, either, as Cameron recently revealed that he spent an entire year writing a sequel that he ultimately scrapped. We now know that film would’ve been titled Avatar: The Higher Ground.
“I was working with a team of writers. We had a lot of ideas,” Cameron told Total Film. “We kept trying to corral it into a box and it never quite fit. So at a certain point, I said, ‘I’ll just finish it, and see if it’s a movie.’ I did. It came out, I think, at 130 pages. It was like, ‘Man, this is a great story. This is a hell of a read.'”
Despite it having a “great story” with “a lot of ideas”, Cameron says he ultimately decided to drop the sequel because “it was missing one of those critical elements about sequels, which is that it didn’t go enough into the unexpected. It also didn’t play enough by ‘Avatar’ rules, which is to connect us to the dream world, that which has a spiritual component that we can’t even quite quantify in words. It ticked every other box, but it didn’t tick that one.”
One aspect that he wishes could’ve made the cut and been included in other sequels? The Na’vi fighting in zero-G!
“I mean, you’ve got the Na’vi fighting with bows and arrows in zero-G. I mean, I’m there! I want to see that movie. But it just didn’t achieve enough of the overall story and thematic goals that I had in mind. So we’re turning it into a Dark Horse graphic novel. You’ll be able to see that interim battle that took place between movie one and movie two.”
Cameron says some aspects of The Higher Ground have been included in The Way of Water, so we’ll get to see them when the film opens on December 16th.
