James Cameron has revealed canceled plans for ‘The High Ground’, an insane Avatar sequel with zero gravity battles.
We are less than a month away from Avatar: The Way of Water, the long-awaited follow-up to Cameron’s 2009 box office king of the world, which is still the highest-grossing movie of all time to this day and beloved around the globe. Despite what people online will have you believe.
It’s the first of four planned sequels, set to be followed by The Seed Bearer, The Tulkun Rider, and The Quest for Eywa, if Avatar 2 is commercially successful.
The Way of Water has been a long journey for the director, who once spent a whole year working on a sequel we’ll never see: The High Ground.
James Cameron wrote a 130-page script for a canceled Avatar sequel
In a new interview with Total Film, Cameron spoke about his scrapped Avatar sequel, titled The High Ground. It wasn’t some daft, flimsy idea – he worked on it for a whole year, writing a 130-page script to boot.
“We were noodling around. 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,” he explained.
“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.’
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“But 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.”
Canceled Avatar sequel has been adapted for a canon graphic novel
Don’t worry, though – Cameron hasn’t completely binned 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,” he said.
Parts of the canceled sequel have been adapted for a graphic novel set between the first and second film, which will be available from December 6.
“There’s some great stuff in it. I mean, you’ve got the Na’vi fighting with bows and arrows in zero-G,” Cameron continued.
“I mean, I’m there! I want to see that movie. But it just didn’t achieve enough of the overall story and thematic goals that I had in mind. So we’re turning it into a Dark Horse graphic novel. You’ll be able to see that interim battle that took place between movie one and movie two.”
Avatar: The Way of Water is due for release on December 16. You can find out more here.
