James Cameron Explains The “Vicious” Reason For Avatar 3’s Title Change
“I think it goes to darker places than the previous ones did.”
James Cameron is best known as the guy you turn to for scale and spectacle — but he can also offer plenty of emotional resonance when necessary. It’s the latter that made 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water such a pleasant surprise: Though its action sequences were incredible, it was the character work that truly sold the film.
It helps that The Way of Water sets up such a strong familial dynamic right off the bat. The film reintroduces us to the Sully clan after 16 years, positioning the children of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) as the new heroes of the franchise. But their journey wasn’t entirely without hardship. When Jake and Neytiri’s eldest son is killed fighting the RDA — the human-led organization that’s trying to colonize the planet Pandora — the clan is nearly fractured. Both Jake and Neytiri nearly snap, briefly giving in to rage and grief and seeking vengeance against Colonel Quaritch (the human villain of Avatar, resurrected in Na’vi form but played once again by Stephen Lang).
The Way of Water’s third act kicks off with a tense standoff between the Sullys and Quaritch, with Neytiri threatening to kill Quaritch’s quasi-son, Spider (Jack Champion). It’s one of the most rattling moments in a film full of subtle, complex character work, and it may also be the most important in The Way of Water. As the story continues and the Sullys try to move on, that brief confrontation might inform a cycle of violence and hate in Cameron’s next Avatar film, Fire and Ash.
Cameron unveiled the official title for Avatar 3 at this year’s D23 Expo. Fire and Ash beat out a handful of potential titles that have been floating around in the ether lately, from The Seed Bearer to The Tulkun Rider. There’s a chance that those titles could be attached to future sequels down the line, but Fire and Ash feels like the perfect title for this stage of the saga, on both a literal and metaphorical level.
“It took a long time to come up with a title that I felt resonated with what’s in the film,” Cameron told Entertainment Weekly at D23. “If you think of fire as hatred, anger, violence, that sort of thing, and ash is the aftermath. So what’s the aftermath? Grief, loss, right? And then what does that cause in the future? More violence, more anger, more hatred. It’s a vicious cycle.”
Fire and Ash may be building on Neytiri’s shocking standoff with Quaritch in The Way of Water: What might have happened if she’d given in to her rage? It sounds like the new film will be exploring even darker territory than its predecessors, though Cameron wouldn’t call the entire film a dark affair.
Fire and Ash will take its central cast to “dark places,” according to James Cameron.
“I think it goes to darker places than the previous ones did,” the filmmaker continued. “We’re not afraid to go into the dark places of our characters, which I think is also good. I think that’s also what people really feel they want when they get to know a character well, either through a series or whatever it is that they follow. They want to know more. They want to know more about them, find out what their limits are, so to speak. And we do that.”
That darkness may not begin and end with the Sullys, either. Fire and Ash will also travel to a new frontier of Pandora, introducing audiences to the Ash People, “an aggressive, volcanic race” of Na’vi that serve as antagonists to our heroes. Either way, the new film is poised to deliver another major confrontation, this time between Na’vi tribes, raising the stakes of an already-heightened adventure.
