Avatar producer Jon Landau has cleared up a major misconception about the sequels: Fast & Furious and Guardians of the Galaxy actor Vin Diesel is not in the movies, despite what the star has said in the past.
Speculation began when Diesel shared a video of himself with Avatar director James Cameron on the New Zealand set of The Way of Water in 2019.
“It’s long overdue, there is one person in Hollywood I’ve always wanted to work with and learn from, and so, all things come, I guess, to those that wait,” Diesel said in the video, which certainly suggested he had joined the cast.
“Vin was a fan,” Landau now tells Empire of that video. “He came in, visited the set one day to see what we were doing and people took that out of context.”
In everyone else’s defense, Diesel kept talking about Avatar off social media and didn’t dispute press when asked about his potential involvement in the films. In fact, he told Entertainment Tonight in a video interview in 2019, “Probably my favorite in the whole cast [and] the closest in my family is Zoe Saldaña. Hence Avatar. Hence why I’m doing Avatar, or one of the reasons.”
The Avatar sequels will have plenty more to offer than Diesel going blue. After The Way of Water, which premiered in December and introduced the Metkayina clan of reef-dwelling Na’vi, the next three movies will visit different biomes of Pandora and explore different cultures.
Cameron mentioned in recent interviews that Avatar 3 will bring forth “the Ash People,” a tribe that will signify fire. Screenwriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, who wrote the screenplay for The Way of Water with Cameron, were hesitant to talk about these characters in conversation with EW. But they mentioned, “None of us hesitated at all when [Cameron] presented the idea. We all flipped out.”
Avatar 3 is scheduled to hit theaters on Dec. 20, 2024; Avatar 4 will drop Dec. 18, 2026; and Avatar 5 will premiere Dec. 22, 2028 — all, at present, without Diesel.
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