James Cameron says his ‘Avatar’ sequels will surely fail without an element that can’t be described

While doing the press round for The Way of the Water, James Cameron opened up ScreenRant about how his initial rejection of the script led to him hiring a dream writing team. Before putting together his writers’ room, Cameron set to work to inspire creatives to speed up by giving them more exposure to Pandora’s world. “I sat down and took a bunch of notes over six months,” he said. “Literally every day I sat at my desk talking about the world, the characters, trying to talk about what happened the day after Jake woke up in a Na’vi body and just moving the story forward.”

Arriving at the writers’ room with 800 single-spaced pages of notes, Cameron begged the creatives to “make [their] The Aliens director then went on to detail how he and the writers tried to understand the essence of the first film and what made it so successful.

“It had to hit the heart, it had to hit the mind, it had to hit the imagination, and it had to hit something even deeper, which was hard for us to quantify,” he said. By all accounts, Avatar was filled with heart, stimulating visuals, and teeming with imagination. But there’s one more thing the sequels need. “Something you could call spiritual or subconscious,” Cameron said. “Some kind of connection that you can’t even describe in words. And I said, “If we can’t do it again, then we’ll fail.”

Will he fail? Audiences will be there when Avatar: The Way of Water hits theaters on December 16, 2022.