Fire and Ash’ After Audiences Saw ‘Way of Water’

“After [Avatar: The] 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,” James Cameron told io9 recently. ‘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.”

Cameron said that to us a few weeks ago talking about Avatar: Fire and Ash, which is now in theaters. It was an intriguing tidbit that was missing one key piece of information. What, specifically, did he change after he saw the audience reactions to The Way of Water?

Well, in a new interview with the Wrap, Cameron did answer that question. And our speculation was right on the money for one of the things. He added more of the space whale Payakan because audiences loved him so much. “There was such a strong emotional response to Payakan as a character that I had to build up his part in movie three,” Cameron said. “If any breakout star emerges from a movie, you’d build up that part in the subsequent film.”

Beyond beefing up Payakan, Cameron also changed a key moment between Jake Sully and his new water tribe, the Metkayina.

“In the original script, he asked the question [whether or not they want to use guns] three times, [and] they finally answer in the affirmative, because they’ve got to defend the Tulkun,” Cameron said. “And I thought it was important to say, ‘All right, you could be a pacifist, but at some point, there are things that are worth fighting for.’”

But that notion changed after the film was released, partially because of the Uvalde school shooting in 2022.

“I did not want to glorify or fetishize the assault weapon,” Cameron said. “Now I’m a little bit trapped, because I got a character who defines himself as a Marine. And the Marine’s ethos is a Marine and his rifle are the most powerful weapon in the world. That’s how they think. And so I thought, ‘All right, I’m going to keep it singular to Jake and his way of doing things, but I’m not going to let him contaminate the Na’vi way, and their value system.’ These are things that were fluid going along.”

Because Jake wasn’t arming the Metkayina, though, Cameron also shifted the expected reunion between Jake and Toruk, the huge, dragon-like creature he befriends in the first film. That was going to come in a later movie, but Cameron moved it up to give the Na’vi added firepower against the humans. “That was an adjustment on the fly,” Cameron said.

Avatar: Fire and Ash is now in theaters. Check back Monday, December 22, for our full, spoiler-filled breakdown.

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