Avatar 3 is set for release in 2024, but Ubisoft’s new Avatar video game will debut first, and the Ubisoft Forward gameplay footage teases a Star Wars-sized release.
The years leading up to the release of James Cameron’s long-gestating Avatar sequel The Way of Water were fraught and filled with debate. Does anyone care about this so-called franchise? Did 2009’s Avatar have true “cultural impact” despite becoming the highest-grossing movie of all time by the end of its theatrical run? Was Kate Winslet holding her breath in a motion-capture water tank long enough to break free-diving records really “worth it”? Cameron, heeding the “put up or shut up” call, silenced the skeptics — The Way of Water became a massive hit with positive critic scores to boot. The discourse tune immediately shifted from “really, more Avatar?” to “Avatar 3 nowpleasethankyou.”
Cameron’s triumph sets the bar high for the third installment, already in the can and slated for 2024, but even higher for everyone else with chips on Avatar being more than a quadrilogy of theatrical events. Everyone in the toys, comics books, collectibles, and Hawaiian shirt businesses needs Cameron’s universe to extend far beyond where the filmmaker will ultimately take it. Which brings us to December’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Ubisoft’s stab at actually turning Avatar into the next Star Wars.
At Monday’s Ubisoft Forward showcase, fans and skeptics alike finally saw more of the grandeur and action promised by the much-delayed game (which will now be released on Dec. 7). The first-person adventure drops players into a playable Na’vi, ahem, avatar, a new character who has just woken from a 15-year cryosleep and is ready to fight the terran RDA forces to save Pandora. It’s not Jake Sully’s story, and as the trailers stressed, the action’s not even taking place on the map around the events of The Way of Water (instead, it’s relocating to the “Western frontier” — please prepare your All Quiet on the Western Frontiers of Pandora jokes). The trailer and gameplay footage bursts with the color and is overrun wildlife unique to the Avatar movies, with shooter-ish gameplay reminiscent of Far Cry. It’s a real game.
Ubisoft frontloading the Frontiers of Pandora footage at Forward echoes the 2017 announcement of the game and the E3 2021 trailer reveal: this is not an IP cash-in. Developed by Massive Entertainment in conjunction with Cameron’s own studio, Lightstorm, the game is intended to live up to the director’s filmmaking. Cameron was even on hand at Ubisoft Forward to set the bar: “We wanted the audience to feel as if they were really on Pandora,” he said in opening remarks, “to dream with their eyes wide open and to explore this world with our characters.
