Ben Procter scored an Oscar nomination recently for his work as a production designer on James Cameron’s “Avatar: The Way of Water”.
With both “Avatar” movies now available on 4K, he’s out doing promotion for the home video release and recently spoke with the SFF Gazette about the time spent working on the sequels.
Procter, who has worked on the “Transformers,” “TRON,” and “Superman” franchises, is committed to the series with his work set to also be seen in the third and fourth films, and he reaffirms here he’s “not going anywhere”.
Asked briefly about the third film, he offered a quick update on where things stand with the film:
“We’re working on [Avatar] 3 right now, trying to get it out the door with the visual effects handoff process.
Before anything could be rendered, Jim’s got his cameras, right? That’s where the shots come from [and is] a step that you know before you hand it off to whatever, to ILM. We’re busily improving and prepping the sets to get ready for that process.
As far as teasing anything more, that is not in my job description [Laughs]. That’s maybe in Jon Landau’s if you try, [but] that is not mine.
He goes on talk a bit about the hard, long-term commitment to these films and how it can have its perks:
All I can say is that we started on this in 2013 with a team that grew and contains so many wonderful people over time. We’ve been working on it as an overall world, with many interesting places to go and things to see from the very beginning. And so I’ll just say, I can’t tell you what’s coming, but I can tell you a lot of cool stuff is coming.”
The comments follow in the wake of the recent shake-up of the film’s release schedule, with the third film now not arriving until December 2025 and the fourth and fifth pushed back to 2029 and 2031, respectively.
