Director James Cameron has a few misgivings about how the upcoming Avatar sequel will be received on the box office but one of the stars harbors no doubts that it will surpass Avengers: Endgame as the highest-grossing film ever.

Stephen Lang has expressed his confidence in the Avatar 2 film, coming out December next year.

He will be reprising his role as the cruel Colonel Quaritch. During an interview with The National, he was asked if the sequel could wrest the title of the highest-grossing film from Avengers and he replied: “I expect so.”

Avengers: Endgame currently has the distinction of having the global box office record with an eye-popping $2.8 billion (£2.3bn).

Cameron has expressed his worries that people may not be interested in revisiting the Avatar universe. It has been more than a decade since the original film was made and fans may not remember why the first film had been so captivating.

The Titanic director explained why a sequel took so long to make, telling Collider: “We’re doing it. It’s never been done before and it’s very tricky because our motion capture system, like most motion capture systems, is what they call optical base, meaning that it uses markers that are photographed with hundreds of cameras.

“The problem with water is not the underwater part, but the interface between the air and the water, which forms a moving mirror. That moving mirror reflects all the dots and markers, and it creates a bunch of false markers.

“It’s a little bit like a fighter plane dumping a bunch of chaff to confuse the radar system of a missile. It creates thousands of false targets, so we’ve had to figure out how to get around that problem, which we did.

“Basically, whenever you add water to any problem, it just gets ten times harder. So, we’ve thrown a lot of horsepower, innovation, imagination, and new technology at the problem, and it’s taken us about a year and a half now to work out how we’re going to do it.”

Other stars who will be reprising their roles in the sequel include Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, and Sigourney Weaver while adding new faces such as Kate Winslet, Vin Diesel, Jermaine Clement, Michelle Yeoh, and Edie Falco.

Avatar 2 is coming out on December 17, 2021, in the UK.

 

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