Avatar Sequels To Resume Filming Soon, Fourth Film To Feature A Big Time Jump

Get ready, because we're going back to Pandora! Well, at least the cast is, because Sam Worthington confirmed in an interview with People Magazine that the next "Avatar" movie will go back to shooting soon.

"We go back to work on it in a month and it's big," Worthington said of "Avatar 3," which is thankfuly not officially titled "The Seed Bearer." Worthington added: "It's bigger than you can imagine."

It is common for actors to say things like "it's bigger than you can imagine" or that a sequel is "bigger than the first," but if there's a franchise where this is something worth paying attention to and believing in, it's James Cameron's "Avatar." The first movie brought on a 3D revolution on its way to becoming the highest-grossing movie ever. Then, over a decade after its release, the sequel delivered the goods with a bigger, better, more ambitious film that expanded the franchise's universe and its themes. The film also brought on even more advancements in technology that helped deliver James Cameron's vision. So when Worthington says the next one is even bigger, well, there's precedent to believe him.

But things will be different when we return to Pandora. When Cameron spoke with People late last year, he said that he shot the motion capture footage for the third movie, and part of the live-action footage for movies three and four because the younger cast was growing up. What's more, Cameron confirmed there will be a time jump in the fourth film for the young characters. "We see them and then we go away for six years and we come back," Cameron said. "And so the part where we come back is the part we haven't shot yet. So we'll start on that after three is released."

Time jumps can be one of the coolest and most effective narrative tools for worldbuilding. Anime and manga do this all the time, where stories following young teenagers feature a big time jump, after which the protagonist is older, more trained, and much more powerful — as are the threats. One of the best and most surprising of these is "Gurren Lagann," which uses a time jump to hugely change the tone of the story, and increase its scope from a small-scale story of rebellion to an intergalactic fight where galaxies are thrown around like baseballs. It's weird. It's awesome.

That James Cameron will introduce a six-year time jump in "Avatar 4" after already doing a 16-year time jump in "The Way of Water" is one of the best things he could do. It shows that the world of "Avatar" truly is bigger than just Jake Sully, that it is a family saga and a generational battle for the fate of Pandora. Given that the Disney theme park is technically canon, and also set a century after the end of the conflict shown in the films, it's likely this story will play out over many, many years.

Say what you will about the simplistic story of the first film, but if they keep doing time jumps, then by the time "Avatar 5" is released (22 years after the original), we'll have witnessed a sci-fi epic unlike any other in blockbuster cinema.