Unsurprisingly, the four planned Avatar sequels are going to cost a pretty penny.
On Monday, Deadline reported that the four Avatar sequels had officially started production, concurrently, and that their total budget was $1 billion. As the outlet notes, both in terms of number of the films shooting at one time and the combined budget for those films, this has never been done before. The closest that comes on both counts is the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, which was all shot at once and cost $260 million.
The first Avatar film was a CGI-effects laden, money-making monster, officially costing $237 million to make, and grossing almost $2.788 billion globally. As a result, the four planned sequels were expected to have a pretty hefty price tag when combined, but still, $1 billion U.S. dollars is a tremendous amount of cash, even if, divided equally, it comes out to $250 million per film, a number that’s not such a far cry from the average for films from huge franchises.
However, $1 billion is still an impressive number to be ready to pay for a film series that will pick up more than a decade after the first film came out in 2009, and hasn’t had the chance to prove it can still fill a comparable number of theater seats.
In any case, for the time being, Avatar fans can breathe a sigh of relief that the sequels are finally getting off the ground.
The scheduled release dates for the sequels are as follows:
Avatar 2: December 18, 2020
Avatar 3: December 17, 2021
Avatar 4: December 20, 2024
Avatar 5: December 19, 2025
