Picture this scenario: you’re hired to work on the sequels to a major motion picture, one that’s become the highest grossing film of all time. The catch is, you don’t have a finished script to any of these movies, but you’ll be working with the creator of this universe, and with a ton of meticulous notes. For production designer Ben Procter and the rest of the team that worked on the Avatar sequels, that’s exactly how they started working on all of the planned sequels, almost a decade ago this summer.
I learned this pretty daunting story during an interview with Procter on behalf of celebrating the home release of Avatar: The Way of Water. As the wildly successful sequel is currently available on Digital, as well as 4K, Blu-ray, and DVD, I was able to speak with the man who specified himself as the “hard surface” production designer on what we both referred to as “The Sequels.”
With his duties stretching to the recently-delayed Avatar 5, Ben Procter and the team he was drafted to work among were all present at Lightstorm Entertainment from the beginning of James Cameron’s magnum opus. And as he revealed to CinemaBlend, that process involved a lot of back and forth with the creator/director of the franchise, and that mythically huge set of notes:
August of 2013, believe it or not, is when Dylan [Cole] and I and our Lead Character designer, Joe Pepe, started at Lightstorm, on the sequels. We were really from the beginning, believe it or not, working on ”The Sequels.” There were no scripts. There was [only] Jim's 1,500 pages of crazy man notes, of ideas for all of this entire arc and this expansion of the world that he wanted to do. He was working with the writers in a writer's room, in a different part of the building. But they were by no means finished with their work, and there was a great, wonderful back and forth sort of mutual inspiration period of time there, where we got to know the writers, and it was awesome. It's something that doesn't often happen.
Dylan Cole is who Ben Procter credits as his Avatar sequels co-production designer, with Cole’s specialty being the “organic side.” Meaning “the planet, the flora, the fauna, the Na’vi architecture,” and even some props for the indigenous people of Pandora, all come from Dylan’s end of the project. That leave Ben pretty much involved in what you’d expect in the realm of “hard surface” design.
Procter’s design duties apply to all of the human and Earth elements seen in Avatar: The Way of Water and its three sequels. No matter which half of the equation you focus on, that work was quite extensive, with four movies on deck to design. And again, all the team had to go by was James Cameron telling them the story beats he intended to cover over the next decade-plus of movie making; which, according to Cameron himself, only came after an intense process to understand what made Avatar such a massive hit.
It was certainly a good thing to have time to burn throughout the history of Avatar sequel delays, as my CinemaBlend interview with Ben Procter revealed just how long it took for the production design team to wrap their heads around the narrative. And in a fun little tease below, Procter also revealed that his first design still hasn’t seen the screen just yet:
From the beginning, we were designing sort of across all the movies. ... I think it took us probably a year and a half to even understand the story arc well, to know which thing we were just designing. We were just exploring these elements that Jim knew he needed to tell the story, or amazing new biomes for the planet of Pandora or new cultures. … The very first thing I worked on … you're not going to see it for years from now. So there was no linear relationship between the story and our process.
As you probably expected by now, Ben Procter did not reveal that very first design that Avatar fans will get a glimpse of in the future. While The Way of Water is just making its way to home audiences, along with the new 4K remaster of 2009’s Avatar, there’s still some extra time for those who want to be on Pandora to dig a little deeper into the past; especially when the newly-released sequel has a behind-the-scenes documentary, titled “Inside Pandora’s Box,” that’s almost as long as the movie itself.
What we know about Avatar 3 is that it’ll now open in December 2025, a year later than its previously specified release date. For now, producer Jon Landau has shared a hopeful message that while the next return trip to Pandora is a little further off than planned, the family working behind the scenes on these grand tales is still hard at work.
As Ben Procter, Dylan Cole and the rest of the design team await showing off the totality of their work, there might be some more room to perfect their visions of a far-flung future focused on family and ecology. Though the scripts may be completed at this phase in production, that fact may only allow all involved to further sharpen the concepts at work to carry this long haul franchise into the next decade.
For now, fans can relive the moments they love from the Avatar franchise through the digital and physical releases of both the 2009 original and The Way of Water. Also, if you have an active Disney+ subscription, those same options are open at the time of this writing, with both installments streaming. Avatar 3, on the other hand, is set to take its bow on December 19, 2025.
