If there was one working director, on the entire planet, who you’d think could worry less about his budgets versus his box office profits, it would presumably be James Cameron. There’s nothing new in noting that Cameron is the most fiscally successful film director of all time; even without worrying about inflation, adding up the tallies of all the films the man’s written and directed over the years puts his haul somewhere in the $10 billion range, a number that no other filmmaker on Earth has ever even come close to scratching. Cameron has a billion-dollar ($1.23 billion, if you want to get specific about it) movie, Avatar: Fire And Ash, in theaters at this very moment. All of which makes it kind of wild to hear him talking about worries that he’s just got to get his costs down if he’s ever actually going to make Avatars 4 and 5.
This is per IGN, which was in turn quoting an interview Cameron gave to Taiwan’s TVBS News, in which he will not, no matter how hard he’s asked, confirm that he’s actually making those two long-announced sequels as of yet. It’s not precisely clear when Cameron filmed the interview, i.e., whether he knew Fire And Ash was going to wind up with a box office haul that, yes, clocked in at a bit more than half of 2022’s Avatar: Way Of Water—but which still made it the third-biggest worldwide box office performer of 2025. “We have to do well to continue,” he tells reporters, noting that the box office is “depressed.” “We have to do well and we need to figure out how to make Avatar movies more inexpensively in order to continue.”
Budgets for Way Of Water and Fire And Ash are a bit tricky to separate out, given that Cameron filmed the two movies simultaneously, but sources usually quote numbers as high as $460 million. (Cameron himself won’t confirm exact numbers, simply calling the budgets “a metric fuckton of money,” meaning the resulting films need to make “two metric fucktons of money to make a profit.”) Given that Cameron owns Avatar—with distribution rights and merch owned by Disney—and that these last two movies have taken seven years of his and a whole lot of other people’s lives to make and get into theaters, it makes a certain sense that he might still be feeling a little commitment-phobic.
Indeed, “If I make them” has been a common refrain from Cameron throughout the press tour for Fire And Ash. Even as he’s confirmed that Michelle Yeoh will appear in those new films—hypothetically—he’s also made statements promising that, in the absence of the last two movies, he’ll hold a press conference to just tell people how they would have ended. In a different director, it’d read as a lack of confidence, but this is, well, James Cameron—a man who will happily hijack an anniversary special just so he can semi-definitively tell people complaining about that door at the end of Titanic to fuck off. If he says the way he makes Avatar movies has to change for them to make Avatar 4 and 5 make fiscal sense, he’s the man in the position to know.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.