Zoe Saldana Teases New ‘Avatar’ Movie

Zoe Saldana recently teased the new Avatar movie by sharing a photo of herself and her franchise co-star Sam Worthington.

The black and white photo of the two was shared to Saldana’s Twitter page, and features the actress with her arm around Worthington’s head while donning some brightly colored tribal markings.

“READY FOR THE NEXT ONE…?” she wrote in the post’s caption.

A number of fans have since commented on the post, with one tweeting back, “hell yeah we are ready and waiting with bated breath miss Saldana,” while another fan commented, “Yes!!! It feels like we’ve been waiting forever!!!”

The official Twitter page of the Avatar franchise also tweeted back, writing, “We were born ready.”

Saldana plays the CGI-character Neytiri — a member of the Na’vi race, who are indigenous to the Pandora moon — in the Avatar franchise. In the first film, which was released in 2009, she falls in love with Worthington’s Jake Sully, and together they help the Na’vi to stop the The Resources Development Administration from mining Pandora into desolation.

Avatar was met with general positive reviews when it was released, and audiences responded by helping the film set numerous box office records.

Director James Cameron then planned on doing multiple sequels, the first of which — Avatar 2 — is scheduled to be released in 2020. While little is known about the next Avatar film at this time, it is said that it will take place several years after the first film, and will focus on Pandora’s oceans.

While Cameron is certainly optimistic about the future of the Avatar franchise, he hasn’t abandoned realism, saying in a previous interview, “Let’s face it, if Avatar 2 and 3 don’t make enough money, there’s not going to be a 4 and 5.”

“They’re fully encapsulated stories in and of themselves,” he continued, according to Empire. “It builds across the five films to a greater kind of meta narrative, but they’re fully formed films in their own right, unlike, say, The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, where you really just had to sort of go, ‘Oh, s—, all right, well I guess I better come back next year.’ Even though that all worked and everybody did.”

“It was highly optimistic that we could start quickly until scripts are written. If there’s no scripts, there’s nothing, right? The scripts took four years,” Cameron went on to reveal. “You can call that a delay, but it’s not really a delay because from the time we pushed the button to really go make the movies until now, we’re clicking along perfectly. We’re doing very well because of all the time that we had to develop the system and the pipeline and all that. We weren’t wasting time, we were putting it into tech development and design.”

“So when all the scripts were approved, everything was designed. Every character, every creature, every setting,” he continued. “In a funny way it was to the benefit of the film because the design team had more time to work… Most of the actors, the key principals, have all read all four scripts, so they know exactly what their character arcs are, they know where they’re going, they know how to modulate their arc now across the first two films. We all know where we’re supposed to be dramatically in the saga, and that’s great.”

Avatar 2 is currently slated to open in theaters on Dec. 18, 2020, but that premiere date could potentially change sometime in the next two years.