Pain IncomingJames Cameron keeps teasing Avatar 3's evil Na'vi clan and 'brave choices' and I think my boy Jake Sully might be cookedThe Wind Traders sound like chill people though.Image credit: 20th Century Studios News by Fran Ruiz Contributor Published on Jan. 16, 2025 Though its release still feels like yesterday, Avatar: The Way of Water will be three years old this Christmas, which is when us Pandora lovers will be seated for Avatar: Fire and Ash. With less than 12 months to go now, more and more information is starting to pile up, and James Cameron insists that he'll surprise us again with the threequel.Ahead of Empire's next issue, we've been learning a lot about upcoming 2025 blockbusters. It's gonna be a packed year, much more than 2024, but after two ridiculously massive box office hits, the general consensus is that Cameron's third visit to Pandora will clear the competition again.To see this content please enable targeting cookies. "Were just starting to riff on it and twist it and turn it... Its a tricky thing. We could be getting high on our own supply here, and everybody who looks at it goes, F**k, thats not what I signed up for. But if youre not making brave choices, youre wasting everybodys time and money," the director warns. While some folks might argue the second Avatar remained family-friendly and rather predictable, I'm sure the deceased main villain from the first one coming back all blue thanks to hard sci-fi tech, Sigourney Weaver playing a mystery Ghibli-like teenage girl, and a kid getting coldly smoked weren't on most people's bingo card.As for the recurring delays that have hit the production and post-production process on these sequels, it seems that we shouldn't expect another one this year: "Weve doubled the number of shots finished at this stage of the game than we had on movie two [and] the films are about equal length. So that puts us well ahead of the curve, which is something Ive never, frankly, experienced before." He jokes they might be "getting good at this" like he and his crew didn't reshape CGI and rock the box office twice, all while convincing most critics.Through another chunk from the same interview, we've also learned a bit more about Varang (Oona Chaplin) and her people's role in the third chapter of the story: "Varang is the leader of a people who have gone through an incredible hardship. She's hardened by that... She will do anything for them, even things that we would consider to be evil... Were trying to evolve beyond the all humans are bad, all Navi are good paradigm." This might be the most exciting thing about the third Avatar. The introduction of Recoms in The Way of Water worked wonders for the story and its villain, and shaking things up with a new conflict that goes beyond the differences between mankind and Na'vi sounds like the right move at this point of the overarching plot. Still, expect more RDA troops to get absolutely wrecked by Pandora's natives. Image credit: 20th Century StudiosI'm not gonna lie: I'm a bit worried about Jake Sully. After having just lost his older son, you'd expect him to be front and center in the next one, and he might just be, but we know that there's a big time jump planned after Fire and Ash and that Cameron plotted this whole thing out as a generational storyline, so maybe the threequel's hardest turn will be to off our favorite blue family man. All this talk about the Sullys facing even more challenges and the new Na'vi clan being unfriendly only adds wood to that fire.On the other hand, Avatar 3 will also introduce the Wind Traders, who sound like a bunch of chill guys flying around Pandora's skies with giant-jellyfish-powered ships (the coolest thing I've ever heard): "Theyre nomadic traders, equivalent to the camel caravans of the Spice Road back in the Middle Ages." There's a reason why these movies work so well, and I think it comes down to the sick worldbuilding executed in spectacular fashion first and foremost.Avatar: Fire and Ash opens on December 19, 2025. We're not expecting a first trailer before late April or early May. After a longer break, Avatar 4 arrives on December 21, 2029, with Avatar 5 hitting two years later, on December 19, 2031.