As with Star Wars before it, James Cameron's Avatar franchise has had an interesting path in the world of both films and theme park attractions. Disney made a deal with Cameron to bring Avatar to Disney's Animal Kingdom as Pandora: The World of Avatar, which opened in 2017, and while Avatar was not a Disney IP at the time, it is now, following the purchase of 21st Century Fox.
Now that Avatar is truly part of Disney, we can expect a lot more to be done with the world of Pandora in the theme parks, so when I spoke with Walt Disney Imagineer Mark LaVine, who appears in the upcoming Disney+ series Behind the Attraction, and who led the story work for Pandora - the World of Avatar, I had to ask him what he could tell me about plans for Pandora in connection with the forthcoming sequels. Unfortunately, LaVine didn't reveal any brand new rides that are on the way. According to him, he has no idea what's coming with the sequels or how it could tie into the theme park land. However, he did say that some elements of the Avatar sequels might already be hidden inside the land. LaVine said...
I’m as eager to see them as you are. I do think some of the things that might be in our land, we don’t even know this, may be hinted at of things coming up in movies. I don’t know that as a fact. I’ll be looking out for it though when those movies come to say ‘Oh, ok, that’s why that thing's interesting.’
This isn't the first time that it's been hinted that elements built into Pandora: The World of Avatar could turn out to be important in movies that were still years away when the land was built. James Cameron has previously said the same thing. What's potentially interesting here is that apparently the Imagineers that were tasked with implementing all these ideas into the land apparently did so with zero knowledge as to what some of these elements actually meant. Even they were not told what all this stuff means.
Of course, considering the absolutely wild road that the Avatar sequels took to get to the big screen, and the fact that technically, only two of them are for sure happening right now, anything is possible. It could very well be that whatever James Cameron talked Imagineers into creating for Pandora: The World of Avatar, changed somewhere along the way as the movies were being written. It took years for Cameron to figure out how many Avatar movies there would be, nevermind what was in them, so it's possible a lot changed in that time.
Perhaps, if we get a second season of Behind the Attraction, it can dive into Pandora and reveal some of these elements. Either that, or Mark LaVine can tell us all about them when he watches Avatar 2 for himself when it comes out next year.
