James Cameron once canceled the entire script of Avatar 2 because it didn't explore the recipe that made Avatar a global hit, as per The Times.
Explaining his rigorous work for the Avatar franchise, the Titanic director said, "When I sat down with my writers to start Avatar 2, I said we cannot do the next one until we understand why the first one did so well. We must crack the code of what the hell happened."
Cameron and his team came to the following conclusion: "All films work on different levels. The first is surface, which is character, problem, and resolution. The second is thematic. What is the movie trying to say? But 'Avatar' also works on a third level, the subconscious. I wrote an entire script for the sequel, read it and realized that it did not get to level three. Boom. Start over. That took a year."
The Academy-award winner revealed that he nearly fired his “Avatar” sequel writers due to not focusing on what made the film global-hit, “When I sat down to write the sequels, I knew there were going to be three at the time and eventually it turned into four, I put together a group of writers and said, ‘I don’t want to hear anybody’s new ideas or anyone’s pitches until we have spent some time figuring out what worked on the first film, what connected, and why it worked,’” Camerons said.
“They kept wanting to talk about the new stories. I said, ‘We aren’t doing that yet.’ Eventually I had to threaten to fire them all because they were doing what writers do, which is to try and create new stories. I said, ‘We need to understand what the connection was and protect it, protect that ember and that flame.’”
Avatar: The Way of Water will hit theaters on December 16.