AVATAR 1.5

Before writing The Way Of Water, Cameron penned, and later scrapped, an entirely different, feature-length screenplay for Avatar 2. Now retooled as a three-part graphic novel, The High Ground will fill in the 14-year gap between Avatar and its sequel. Cameron explains…

“What happened was, 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. 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 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. And I thought, ‘We shouldn’t make this movie.’ So I set it aside. 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. There’s some great stuff in it. I mean, you’ve got the Na’vi fighting with bows and arrows in zero-G. 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.”