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Avatar: The Waterway is conquering the box office all over the world. Despite fears of a very long wait compared to the first film, the new chapter in James Cameron's saga is proving to be a powerhouse, aiming for 17 million dollars in box office in the United States, obviously destined to grow during the holiday weeks, while it has already accumulated in Italy 11 million euros. And since there was no doubt that this adventure set in Pandora would also win over audiences, there were already other films of the same series in the pipeline: if the initial project envisaged a total of five films, the third one has actually already been made , and filmed in conjunction with the second. Why this choice, which in the eyes of some might have seemed risky in some way?For Cameron the main reason, in addition to an obvious optimization of the budget and cast, was one: that is to avoid the so-called “Stranger Things effect ” , as the director himself called it. The reference is obviously to the Netflix cult series starring the Hawkins kids, who aren't that much kids by now. Also in Water Street there are actors at a young age : Trinity Jo-Li Bliss was 7 years old when she was cast as Tuk for this sequel and is now already 13 years old, while Jack Champion, the interpreter of Spider, He's 12 and now 18 and "it's growing like weeds," Cameron says. To avoid an excessive disconnect between the age of the young protagonists and that of their characters, the filmmaker therefore decided to shoot the two films together, and also the first part of the fourth chapter: “Otherwise then you have the Stranger Things effect - even if I love Stranger Things — where they're supposed to go to high school and we look like we're 27 instead,” he said.
The concurrence of filming, while exhausting, was also useful for the actors : “ We read the scripts and discussed extensively where we were, defining the distinctive points of the second and third films ”, he told Entertainment Weekly Zoe Saldaña , who plays Neytiri in this saga: “ This is why it has never been uncomfortable for me, but only because we prepared so much ”. For producer Jon Landau, then, he didn't even take the risk of making films that were too similar to each other: “Each film introduces new clans and new cultures to Pandora. And when we introduce a character it will always be part of a continuous evolution ”. The third Avatar film will be released in December 2024 , with the other two expected to arrive in 2026 and 2028.