James Cameron has made three of the most successful movies at the global box office that have ever been created. However, not everything he touches turns to gold. The Cameron-produced Alita: Battle Angel, while it has become a cult hit, wasn’t the success it needed to be in order to get its much-needed sequel, but that second film might still happen. Cameron’s producing partner Jon Landau says conversations about a sequel are happening, and Avatar: The Way of Water is going to help.
There is a very loud contingent of fans who are passionate about Robert Rodriguez’s Alita: Battle Angel, but the movie wasn’t a runaway box office smash, and with Disney’s purchase of Fox, the future of the franchise is still very much an open question. However, Jon Landau tells ScreenRant that he is hopeful that the technical advancements made in producing Avatar: The Way of Water would make an Alita sequel even better. And it’s not entirely theoretical, as there is work being done toward making an Alita sequel happen. Landau said…
We're working on it. I think what we've learned from Avatar is how much more facial nuance and subtlety that we can get into characters that we want to be emotional and emote that are humanoid. Alita would not have been possible, but for what we did on Avatar. Avatar: Way of Water would not be what it is but what we did for Alita. And now let's put that back and give it back to Alita. We're talking to Robert and talking to Rosa and all is good.
James Cameron isn’t just about making crowd-pleasing movies. He’s always interested in finding new ways to use technology and ways to push that technology to new heights. And as Landau says here, the technology builds on itself. The producer says that creating Alita: Battle Angel made Avatar: The Way of Water better, and in turn the advances made with Avatar can feed back into an Alita sequel.
And there are other ways that Avatar’s success may help Alita. To put it bluntly, when you make a studio a couple of billion dollars, you have a lot more bargaining power. Cameron himself has said he leveraged Titanic’s success with Fox in order to get the first Avatar made. It’s quite possible that he could do something similar with Disney, talking them into making Alita: Battle Angel 2 as something of a reward to him for the success of Avatar 2, and the likely success of the three additional Avatar movies that are on the way.
Alita: Battle Angel made $400 million at the global box office, and another $50 million in home media sales. Based on estimates, it may have broken even, or at worst lost a few million, but even if a sequel followed suit, the Avatar franchise will certainly pay for it. So maybe it will happen.
