Avatar 3 presents a challenge that James Cameron has never faced in his directorial career – and it needs to avoid the problems suffered by the other franchises that Cameron has worked on. After the phenomenal critical and commercial success of Avatar: The Way of Water proved that the Avatar franchise isn’t just a one-trick pony, anticipation is at an all-time high for Avatar 3. Cameron has teased that the third movie will take audiences away from the oceans of The Way of Water to the volcanoes of Pandora, where the “Ash People” clan of the Na’vi resides. This new setting promises another explosive, action-packed sci-fi epic.
In the lead-up to The Way of Water, Cameron’s fans had no reason to be worried, because he had a proven track record for making satisfying sequels. Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgment Day have been hailed as two of the greatest sequels ever made, building on their classic predecessors with bigger, bolder, and more emotionally enriching storytelling. Very few filmmakers are as renowned for their sequels as Cameron. But third movies are a whole different ballgame. Avatar 3 will be the first threequel that Cameron has directed in his entire career, and they’re a lot trickier to get right.
Avatar 3 Will Be James Cameron’s First Threequel
Cameron has never directed a threequel before, so he’s in uncharted territory with Avatar 3. Every film that Cameron has directed has either been an original story, like The Abyss or True Lies, a documentary, a dramatization of a historical event, like Titanic, or the first sequel in a franchise. The only sequels he’s ever directed – Aliens, T2, and, of course, Avatar: The Way of Water – have been the second entry in a series. The second movie just has to outdo the original movie, which is no easy feat, but the third movie is even tougher, because it has to outdo the first movie and the second movie.
His directorial debut was a sequel, Piranha II: The Spawning, but he’s the director of that project in name only, because he was fired and replaced shortly into production. Avatar will be the first time that Cameron has created his own franchise and seen it through to the end. Whereas he passed off the sequels to Aliens and T2 to other directors, he’ll be at the helm of the Avatar saga for its entire duration. He has plans to potentially go all the way to Avatar 7 if the audience demand is there. But first, he has to get the threequel right.
The Third Movie In A Franchise Is Notoriously Difficult To Get Right
It’s notoriously difficult to pull off the third entry in a movie franchise; this is typically referred to as the “threequel curse.” There are some satisfying threequels – Toy Story 3, Before Midnight, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King – but there are a lot more disappointing ones: Jaws 3D, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3, The Godfather Part III, X-Men: The Last Stand, The Matrix Revolutions, The Dark Knight Rises, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Expectations are higher than ever for a third movie (especially if the first two were really great), and it’s almost impossible to meet those expectations.
Cameron’s own franchises haven’t been immune to the threequel curse in the past, but that’s partly because he wasn’t at the helm. After sequelizing Ridley Scott’s horror masterpiece Alien with the action-packed Aliens, David Fincher took over Alien 3 and suffered from studio interference. The Terminator franchise, which Cameron originated, has had not one, but two disappointing threequels. Jonathan Mostow’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was criticized for being a generic actioner, and Tim Miller’s Terminator: Dark Fate, which retconned every post-T2 sequel, was an overcomplicated mess. Avatar 3 needs to be much better than the Alien threequel and either of the Terminator threequels.
Why There’s Still Hope For Avatar 3
Just because Cameron has never pulled off a threequel before, that doesn’t mean there’s no reason to have hope for Avatar 3. He might not have directed a successful third movie, but he’s also never failed as a director. It’s become a trend in Cameron’s filmography that so-called experts expect his movies to fail and they end up being one of the biggest success stories in cinema history. That happened with Titanic, Avatar, and Avatar: The Way of Water. They were all expected to bomb, and all ended up ranking among the biggest blockbusters of all time. Hopefully, that trend will continue in Avatar 3.
