If Hollywood is good at anything, it's resurrecting dead characters. Sigourney Weaver, also known as Dr. Grace Augustine in James Cameron's mega hit Avatar, is able to attest to that fact. Much like Ellen Ripley before her, the good doctor is going to be resurrected from the dead, as most of us assumed but in a different form. But just how different of a form? Well, if her latest statement is anything to go on, it looks like Ms. Weaver will be changing quite a bit - and quite frequently - in the franchise's future.
Vulture managed to grab a couple of moments with the actress at a recent event, and when asked about how her role would continue in the next three films, she responded:
"It will be challenging for me. I can't talk about it, but my part is a little different in each one. I'll transform somewhat."
As you might remember, Sigourney Weaver's character was shot by none other than Stephen Lang's bad ass baddie Lt. Miles Quaritch, who is also returning to the franchise from beyond the grave. If anything, Lang's return is going to be the more puzzling one, because we didn't see him uploaded to the Na'vi mainframe tree in his last moments of life. Weaver's return has been speculated about since day one, and has a much easier path towards believing how it happened in the story.
The revelation that her form of appearance will be different in each film is not that much of a surprise, as her scientific mind is now in the Tree of Souls, and could pull a Transcendence by organizing all of the souls into one super-intelligent hive mind. Maybe we'll even get to see her hop back and forth between the tree and her Na'vi body, which would actually fit in line with James Cameron's original plans for her character. Another possibility is that the whole planet of Pandora is now controlled by Dr. Augustine, seeing as the whole planet is networked and everything. It's the weirdest possibility, but it could make things a lot more entertaining the next couple of sequels.
In the end, the most interesting resurrection may not be that of Sigourney Weaver or Stephen Lang, but of the franchise itself. After all, record breaking as it was, the first film has been a steady target of pop culture ridicule. That plus waiting a full seven years between sequels might dim the franchise's star enough that it won't be a certified mega hit. If you're a Fox shareholder, now's the time to hope that X-Men and Fantastic Four movies can keep pace with the movies being made at Marvel Studios, because the budget of three Avatar films might make or break the studio at this rate. Avatar 2 is set to hit theaters in December 2016, with its two more sequels following in the years following it.
