James Cameron recently spoke to Total Film about Avatar: The Way of Water and he revealed that there was a completely different screenplay that they were going to work on for the sequel. “We were noodling around,” Cameron said. “I was working with a team of writers. We had a lot of ideas. We kept trying to corral it into a box, and it never quite fit. So at a certain point, I said, ‘I’ll just finish it, and see if it’s a movie.’ I did. It came out, I think, at 130 pages. It was like, ‘Man, this is a great story. This is a hell of a read.’”
But despite being completed, James Cameron claimed the script didn’t feel right. “It was missing one of those critical elements about sequels, which is that it didn’t go enough into the unexpected. It also didn’t play enough by Avatar rules, which is to connect us to the dream world, that which has a spiritual component that we can’t even quite quantify in words. It ticked every other box, but it didn’t tick that one,” he said. This resulted in Cameron going for a completely different screenplay that would go on to become Avatar: The Way of Water. However, he still felt strongly about the scrapped Avatar 2 script and decided to release it as a graphic novel titled Avatar: The High Ground. “We figured out a way to restructure the elements that we needed to distribute across the first two of the sequels, and relaunched it in a completely different way,” Cameron said of the script. Avatar: The High Ground will be released on December 6, 2022. Avatar: The Way of Water will hit theaters on December 16, 2022.
