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Thanks to too many good ideas, our next trip to Pandora will be our most extended stay yet. In a recent talk with Empire, director James Cameron said that Avatar: Fire And Ash, the third part in the expansive Avatar saga, will be the longest entry yet because they had so many good ideas left over from The Way Of Water.

“In a nutshell, we had too many great ideas packed into act one of movie 2,” Cameron said. ‘The [film] was moving like a bullet train, and we weren’t drilling down enough on character. So I said, ‘Guys, we’ve got to split it.’ […] Movie 3 will actually be a little bit longer than movie 2.”

Avatar: The Way Of Water clocked in at a blistering three hours and 12 minutes, which was fine because we spent all our time with the magnificent Payakan and his Tulkun friends. We could spend all day underneath the seas of Pandora, asking space whales about their young. However, with Fire And Ash, Cameron expects us to cough up a lung while chilling with the “Ash People,” which might pose a problem for some asthmatic viewers (make sure to check your albuterol refills, y’all). Of course, Cameron has never had much sympathy for theatergoers “whining” about runtime. Upon releasing Way Of Water, he warned his audience that he’ll turn this damn car around if he hears “anybody whining about length when they sit and binge-watch [television] for eight hours.”

“I can almost write this part of the review,” he said in 2022. “‘The agonizingly long three-hour movie…’ It’s like, give me a fucking break. I’ve watched my kids sit and do five one-hour episodes in a row. Here’s the big social paradigm shift that has to happen: it’s okay to get up and go pee.”

While specific plot details of Fire And Ash remain as rare as unobtanium, this trip keeps beco*ing more personal for Cameron. “These characters are amalgams of us, our childhoods, our role as parents, the mistakes we made, and probably to some extent continue to make as parents,” says Cameron. “I mean, Jake is a hard-ass motherfucker. He’s very hard on his kids. Well, that’s me.” In addition to likening himself to the “hard-ass motherfucker” Jake Sulley, a descriptor we’d all use for the character, a childhood friend told Cameron the “relationship between Lo’ak and Neteyam reminded her of the relationship I had with my older brother.”

Avatar: Fire And Ash is still set for release on December 19, 2025.