Alita: Battle Angel Producer Gives Hopeful Update On The Sequel, And How Avatar 2 Is Connected
The chances of an Alita: Battle Angel sequel may be better than we thought.
James Cameron has made three of the most successful movies at the global box office that have ever been created. However, not everything he touches turns to gold. The Cameron-produced Alita: Battle Angel, while it has become a cult hit, wasn’t the success it needed to be in order to get its much-needed sequel, but that second film might still happen. Cameron’s producing partner Jon Landau says conversations about a sequel are happening, and Avatar: The Way of Water is going to help.
There is a very loud contingent of fans who are passionate about Robert Rodriguez’s Alita: Battle Angel, but the movie wasn’t a runaway box office smash, and with Disney’s purchase of Fox, the future of the franchise is still very much an open question. However, Jon Landau tells ScreenRant that he is hopeful that the technical advancements made in producing Avatar: The Way of Water would make an Alita sequel even better. And it’s not entirely theoretical, as there is work being done toward making an Alita sequel happen. Landau said…
James Cameron isn’t just about making crowd-pleasing movies. He’s always interested in finding new ways to use technology and ways to push that technology to new heights. And as Landau says here, the technology builds on itself. The producer says that creating Alita: Battle Angel made Avatar: The Way of Water better, and in turn the advances made with Avatar can feed back into an Alita sequel.
And there are other ways that Avatar’s success may help Alita. To put it bluntly, when you make a studio a couple of billion dollars, you have a lot more bargaining power. Cameron himself has said he leveraged Titanic’s success with Fox in order to get the first Avatar made. It’s quite possible that he could do something similar with Disney, talking them into making Alita: Battle Angel 2 as something of a reward to him for the success of Avatar 2, and the likely success of the three additional Avatar movies that are on the way.
Alita: Battle Angel made $400 million at the global box office, and another $50 million in home media sales. Based on estimates, it may have broken even, or at worst lost a few million, but even if a sequel followed suit, the Avatar franchise will certainly pay for it. So maybe it will happen.
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CinemaBlend’s resident theme park junkie and amateur Disney historian, Dirk began writing for CinemaBlend as a freelancer in 2015 before joining the site full-time in 2018. He has previously held positions as a Staff Writer and Games Editor, but has more recently transformed his true passion into his job as the head of the site's Theme Park section. He has previously done freelance work for various gaming and technology sites. Prior to starting his second career as a writer he worked for 12 years in sales for various companies within the consumer electronics industry. He has a degree in political science from the University of California, Davis. Is an armchair Imagineer, Epcot Stan, Future Club 33 Member.