James Cameron has said that Fire And Ash will need to make a lot of money to justify a sequel, but AI may also play a role in Avatar’s future. James Cameron really wants you to know how hard it is to make an Avatar movie. Earlier this year, in the build up to the ... Avatar | Why AI could be a bigger threat to James Cameron’s franchise than box office
James Cameron has said that Fire And Ash will need to make a lot of money to justify a sequel, but AI may also play a role in Avatar’s future.
James Cameron really wants you to know how hard it is to make an Avatar movie. Earlier this year, in the build up to the release of the third franchise entry, Fire And Ash, Disney released a lengthy, two-part documentary, Fire And Water: Making The Avatar Films.
It begins with an introduction by Cameron, who says, staring directly down the lens, “I’m gonna let you in on a little secret: Avatar movies are not made by computers.”
The rest of the documentary, amounting to around 90 minutes altogether, outlines just how much work goes into making Cameron’s action fantasies. We see how the actors spend long hours crammed into tight-fitting suits, performing the scenes that will then be overlaid with CGI in post-production.
We see the problem-solving that went into The Way Of Water’s aquatic scenes; Cameron experimented with suspending actors on wires and adding the ocean in later, but was dissatisfied with the results. Exacting to the last, Cameron instead opted to film his actors swimming around in real water, with millions of tiny ping pong balls floating around on the surface to help diffuse the light.
It’s all interesting enough, but like so many modern making-ofs, the novelty of watching actors in skin-tight costumes flailing around begins to pall after a while. There’s no doubt that tons of artistry and technical ingenuity goes into turning the data from an actor’s performance into a photo-real, eight-foot-tall blue alien, but it’s hard to make that process particularly compelling for the average audience sitting at home.
Then again, Making The Avatar Films’ goal wasn’t necessarily to immerse us in the magic of filmmaking. Rather, it appeared to be a platform for Cameron to insist, over and over: Avatar movies take real effort and skill to make. There isn’t a magic button you can press that automatically creates a fantasy planet. Cameron and his team haven’t made its feline inhabitants move and emote by typing prompts into ChatGPT.
Cameron expresses the same sentiment, with a certain air of frustration, in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
“We’ve somehow been lumped in with the issue of AI replacing actors,” the filmmaker said. “Anybody who has seen our process is shocked by how performance-centric it is.”
It’s perhaps a little disturbing, even to a futurist like Cameron, just how quickly generative AI has developed. When he made the first Avatar in 2009, it broke new ground in performance capture, artificial environments and 3D. While all of those technologies existed before Avatar, they’d never been used so extensively or so compellingly; when the movie appeared in cinemas that winter, it was an absolute must-see. Critics may have scoffed at the storytelling, but nothing else looked quite like it.
Its sequel, The Way Of Water, came out in December 2022 – coincidentally, just one month after the launch of ChatGPT. Since then, we’ve seen generative AI explode into a technological phenomenon that has dominated conversations on multiple fronts: its impact on jobs, the environment, and what it means for the flow of reliable information.
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While Cameron was working away on this year’s Fire And Ash, the adoption of generative AI has exploded. And with it has come a new phenomenon: photoreal images and footage can now be created from a single sentence. The advent of OpenAI’s Sora 2 platform has seen a torrent of free entertainment emerge: endless clips of Stephen Hawking rolling around on a halfpipe; OpenAI boss Sam Altman grilling Pikachu on a barbecue, and so on.
The excitement around Sora 2 is such that, rather than try to resist the use of its intellectual properties, Disney has made a billion dollar deal with OpenAI which will allow Sora 2’s users to generate clips that feature the likes of Mickey Mouse, Darth Vader, and – perhaps to Cameron’s chagrin – the Na’vi from Avatar.
Not that Cameron is remotely anti-AI. Cameron’s interest in technology is such that he joined the board of a company called Stability AI in 2024, and has argued that gen-AI could be used to cut the cost of creating visual effects shots for movies. Although he’s also said that AI won’t replace artists entirely, he certainly isn’t among the scores of creatives who’ve argued that the technology equates to theft, and that it shouldn’t be used on moral or environmental grounds.
Cameron knows, as well as just about anyone, that generative AI is in the process of changing entertainment forever. And while nobody can predict exactly where the tech might take the planet next, one thing has certainly happened already: the likes of Sora and software like it has made CG imagery even more commonplace than it once was. Then there’s the media flap that surrounded AI ‘actor’ Tilly Norwood; even the notion of a non-human film performer isn’t as outlandish as it was in the day of The Phantom Menace or the first Avatar.
This isn’t to say that the clips spewed out by these apps are as artistically-wrought or convincing as a sequence from Fire And Ash. Or that a dead-eyed Tilly Norwood floating through a scene is equal in quality to a flesh-and-blood actor providing the performance for a CGI character. But for millions of people tapping away at their phones, they don’t have to be. If someone can sit at home and generate a clip of, say, Neytiri driving a Ford Fiesta around the Isle of Man, then that quietly chips away at the Avatar franchise’s event status.
Perhaps this is why, far from promoting the notion of further Avatar sequels, Cameron has begun tamping down the idea. Talking to The Town podcast in early December, the director said that Avatar movies cost a “a metric fuck ton” of money to make, and that Fire And Ash would need to make “two metric fuck tons of money” in order for Disney to greenlight a sequel.
“I have no doubt in my mind that this movie will make money,” he said. “The question is, does it make enough money to justify doing it again?”
Beyond the uncertainty over whether audiences will show up in significant numbers for the third Avatar movie – in all likelihood, they will – there’s the question of Cameron’s own interest in the fantasy universe he’s been lost in for over a decade. In that new THR interview, he seems just as interested in other creative avenues.
“I’ve got other stories to tell, and I’ve got other stories to tell within Avatar,” he said. “What won’t happen is, I won’t go down the rabbit hole of exclusively making only Avatar for multiple years.”
There are a couple of documentaries among his other projects, including a concert film for Billy Eilish, a movie about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and an adaptation of Joe Abercrombie’s book, The Devils. What Cameron seems most enthusiastic about, though, is a return to an altogether darker franchise he created: The Terminator.
“There needs to be a broader interpretation of Terminator and the idea of a time war and super intelligence,” he said. “I want to do new stuff that people aren’t imagining.”
Generative AI is rapidly deadening the impact of fantastical imagery. And more frustratingly for Cameron, audiences are beginning to assume that CG-heavy films have been made with AI even when they aren’t, as the author of that THR piece, James Hibberd, points out.
(When Hibberd mentioned to a friend that he’s writing about Cameron’s latest epic, the response was, “It feels like everything is made with AI now.”)
In 2009, Avatar showcased Cameron’s skill as technical showman. But 16 years later, the ordinarily bullish filmmaker has expressed some doubt over the series’ future (“It’s a coin toss right now. We won’t know until the middle of January”). The next month or two could decide, therefore, whether Cameron continues down a path of performance capture and CGI, or whether the advent of AI has made him think again about The Terminator, and the darker ways in which technology might overtake us.
A fiercely intelligent filmmaker who’s been instrumental in pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in cinema, Cameron is ultimately still an artist whose career is about to be changed by tech. In his making-of documentaries, Cameron pitches himself as an artisan, diligently crafting solid wood chairs of the finest quality. Meanwhile, outside, companies like OpenAI are spewing out more plastic chairs than there are people to sit on them.
