Why James Cameron Made An Unexpected Last-Minute Change To Avatar 3
Toruk: RDA Hunter.
James Cameron’s production plan for the Avatar sequels was a huge and risky endeavor. The Way of Water was the first of four intended sequels, and it was filmed back-to-back with the entirety of Fire and Ash and parts of Avatar 4. That meant the movies could be released quickly and without the actors aging faster than the story, but there are also some major downsides to the approach — it’s harder to let the audience's reaction to one movie sway what happens in the next.
But it’s not impossible, and according to Cameron, parts of Fire and Ash were redone in response to how The Way of Water was received.
Fire and Ash’s plot was tweaked after the release of Way of Water.
“After Way of Water came out, I started to reevaluate and change things a little bit to answer kind of what the audience was responding to,” Cameron told io9. “Who are they interested in? What parts of it are they interested in? I even wrote some new scenes, and we went back, and we redid some stuff.”
Just what was tweaked? Reviews claim that much of Fire and Ash focuses on Payakan, the space whale that Lo’ak bonded with in Way of Water, but an older quote from Cameron suggests he had a different alien species on his mind: the Toruk, the giant bird-like creatures Jake Sully rode in the original Avatar.
Toruk didn’t appear in Way of Water, so its appearance in the Fire and Ash trailer was notable to fans. “It didn’t exist in Fire and Ash,” Cameron told Variety in October 2025. “And I went, ‘Oh, he’s got to go get the bird.’ Come on! I was saving it for a later film. I was like, ‘F*ck that! He should get the bird. Get the Toruk.’ There’s something in Jake’s destiny that requires it, right? So I just re-wrote it, and we went back and we shot two or three scenes around that concept, and I threw some stuff out and stuck that in.”
The Toruk appears in Fire and Ash thanks to a last-minute change.
That’s probably not the only thing changed ahead of Fire and Ash’s December 19 release, as the actors were apparently “always down” to come back and film reshoots. “It didn’t matter. I’d call them up and say, ‘Hey, I got an idea for a scene.’ They’d just come back, and they could drop back into character, and we could drop back into that world so easily, and everybody just loved it,” Cameron told io9. “They’d be off doing other films, and they’d come back and say, ‘We like this.’ It was always home base for them in a strange way.”
In keeping with this pattern, the fan response to Fire and Ash will likely affect the story of Avatar 4. While some of the movie was shot years ago, it won’t wrap production until after Fire and Ash arrives. “We even did part of movie four because our young characters are all going to have a big time jump in movie four,” Cameron told People Magazine back in 2023. “We see them and then we go away for six years and we come back. 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.”
James Cameron has big, big plans for Avatar, but the plan has always been flexible. Whatever proves popular in Fire and Ash could become a major player in the final two movies.
