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James Cameron confirms 'Avatar' sequel titles - and they’re pretty weird

Cameron attended the London premiere of Alita: Battle Angel.
Cameron attended the London premiere of Alita: Battle Angel.

Remember those crazy Avatar sequel titles we all assumed were the result of a blogger’s fever-dream brought on by a Cheetos overdose? Just in case you don’t, they run as follows.

Avatar: The Way of Water, Avatar: The Seed Bearer, Avatar: The Tulkun Rider, and Avatar: The Quest for Eywa. We’re guessing Avatar: The Last Airbender was already taken.

Totally made-up, right? Especially Avatar: The Seed Bearer, which sounds like a euphemism for something else. Nope, they’re real – according to the man himself, writer/director/God, James Cameron.

“I can neither confirm nor deny — all right, here’s what I’ll tell ya: Those titles are among titles that are in consideration. And no final decisions have been made yet,” Cameron told Entertainment Tonight during the promotional tour for Alita: Battle Angel.

Alita: Battle Angel is the latest Hollywood live-action adaption of Japanese manga.
Alita: Battle Angel is the latest Hollywood live-action adaption of Japanese manga.

Okay, so we know that one of the golden rules of cinema is that you should never doubt James Cameron. He’s proved cynical critics wrong time and time and again, but come on.

Still, he does say that no final decisions have been made yet, so we’re guessing at least two of those titles are going to change. Possibly three. We really miss the days of numbered sequels.

And, while we’re on the subject of Avatar, producer Jon Landau recently revealed a startling fact about Kate Winslet’s lung-capacity.

“We built a water tank that was 500,000 gallons of water, and we are doing performance-capture under the water, on the surface of the water, and above the water. We trained our cast to free-breath-hold, because in the sequences they have to just be swimming, they can’t be on scuba, and they have to be able to do long takes. So we had a gentleman named Kirk Krack come in and train everybody that needed to be underwater how to go underwater and how to hold their breath.”

“Kate Winslet had to train in this and she got up to a static breath hold of just about seven minutes. It’s amazing, it’s mind over matter. You see Kate going underwater and she just felt so comfortable. There was one day, we have a tank where she was just rehearsing and testing and we have some windows into it, and I go in there and she’s just walking on the bottom [of the tank] left and right, left and right, left and right, then she sees me in the window and she just waves. I couldn’t believe it!”

Considering that Harry Houdini was once renowned for being able to hold his breath for three minutes, that’s very impressive.

Of course, Winslet had some fairly traumatic experiences on the set of Titanic, so maybe she started her own training as soon as she heard she was going to be in a James Cameron movie named ‘Avatar: The Way of Water.’ Just a guess!


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