‘Avatar 4’ And ‘5’ Already Filming, Loses Papyrus Font, Sigourney Weaver Talks About Shooting Underwater
We’re almost a decade removed from the record-breaking box office success ofJames Cameron’sAvatar, and we’re still years away from seeing if the long-gestatingAvatar 2will reignite audiences' interest in the fictional world of Pandora. It’ll be even longer than that before we seeAvatar 4and5, but despite Cameron’s assertion that those planned sequels aren’t sure bets, production is apparently already underway. And the franchise has already made at least one huge improvement: Cameron and his team have ditched the Papyrus font they used in the first movie.
In a new interview,AvatarstarSigourney Weaversays she’s “busy” working on those sequels now. She also talks a little about the new character she’s playing, her experience filmingAvatar 2and3, and whether or not we’ll ever seeAlien 5directed byChappiefilmmakerNeill Blomkamp. Read Weaver’s quotes and take a look at the new Papyrus-freeAvatarlogo below.
During a chat withThe Hollywood Reporter, Weaver was asked whetherAlien 5– ahighly-publicized potential sequelwhich would see her return to the franchise as Ellen Ripley – will ever happen, and the superstar actress buried a littleAvatartidbit in her answer:
“We almost started to do it when I was working with James Cameron. But by the time we were put off by Fox, Neill had gotten so many jobs that we’d have to wait probably. I’m busy doingAvatar 4and5. I love working with Neill and I think he’d do a terrific job, and James Cameron really thinks it’s a great idea, so you never know. Right now, I think Neill’s got like three projects going at once.”
Alien 5may or may not ever materialize – although, ifHalloweencan bring back Jamie Lee Curtis and make serious money at the box office, maybe that could be the spark Disney/Fox needs to begin seriously exploring it.
The more interesting thing here is Weaver casually mentioning that she’s already busy onAvatar 4and5, because last November, James Cameronoutright said that those movies weren’t guaranteed to even happen:
“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. 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, shit, all right, well I guess I better come back next year.’ Even though that all worked and everybody did.”
In May of this year,AvatarstarZoe Saldanaexplained the production timeline ina different interview:
“We are just about finishing motion capture production on the [second and third] movies, and then after that, they go straight into pre-production for the live-action part that will shoot for six months in New Zealand.”
But in this new interview, Weaver says, “we just finished shooting two and three.”
“We shot it in LA and James has announced publicly that there’s a lot of underwater work, so we learned how to free dive and we did many scenes underwater which was challenging and kind of cool…
…The water becomes another world. The scripts are amazing, and in the first one, which I love, I think he hadn’t set up a lot of things. In this one he got to tell this very personal story. They’re amazing. There’s a message to not sacrifice everything for greed and conquest. It will take all four movies to really make that message loud and clear for the whole world.”
She also again confirmed she’d be playingan entirely different characterin all four of the sequels and not be reprising her role of Dr. Grace Augustine from the first movie. You can read a few more of her comments about theAvatarsequels (as well as her comments about the #MeToo movement) atTHR.
As for the logo,FastCompanypoints out that the officialAvatarTwitter page has changed the franchise’s logo and switched the font from Papyrus to something different. This new iteration keeps Papyrus’s vaguely exotic vibe without carrying the baggage of the font itself, which has become a punching bag in pop culture. About a year ago,Saturday Night Liveaired a hilarious sketchin which a character played by host Ryan Gosling couldn’t get over the fact that the highest-grossing movie in history used such a terrible font, andthe creator of the font even responded to that video going viral. That sketch may have even been the reason for the change; at the very least, theAvatarteam knows all about it:
Fondly reminiscing on the anniversary of our favorite SNL skit. Thanks for the laughs,@nbcsnl!https://t.co/iRiMqHil3m
— Avatar (@officialavatar)August 25, 2025
