James Wan Down to Direct Avatar 4 if James Cameron Decides to Step Aside

James Cameron and Disney haven’t yet decided if there’s going to be an Avatar 4.

Cameron also hasn’t decided how directing duties will be handled on a prospective fourth Avatar film, given the director’s stated intention to move on to other projects.

Yet another director named James — James Wan — says he’d love to be involved in the project should Cameron elect to scale back his involvement with the franchise.

Wan told Screen Rant in an interview: “I have not done Avatar. Yeah, if you could put a good one for me with James Cameron, I’d love to take a crack at that.”

Wan is best known as a hit horror director for his work on the Conjuring, Saw and Insidious franchises, but he also became a member of the billion-dollar club by helming 2018’s effects-filled Aquaman (which globally made $1.15 billion worldwide). He’s also a prolific producer, with credits including M3GAN.

Cameron previously told The Hollywood Reporter that if there’s a fourth film, he’d likely still be the director, but would outsource more of his day-to-day duties to second unit directors — something he already started to do when working on Fire and Ash.

“I’ve learned how to expand the second unit concept,” Cameron said. “For example, most directors don’t operate their own camera, so when I’ve done the performance capture, I operate every damn virtual camera on the first movie. On the second film, I started to lay off some of that to [virtual second unit director] Richard Baneham and to other people. I can imagine laying off the entire thing when I’ve already set the stage for exactly how a scene plays out, and then I’ll circle back around in editorial. So yeah, that’s possible.”

As for whether there will be another Avatar film, Cameron has been candid that it all depends on the box office of Fire and Ash (while stopping short of expressing a specific target number). “This can be the last one. We may find that the release ofAvatar 3proves how diminished the cinematic experience is these days, or we may find it proves the case that it’s as strong as it ever was — but only for certain types of films. It’s a coin toss right now. We won’t know until the middle of January.”

While it’s not quite yet the middle of January, Fire and Ash has already become the latest Cameron film to prove wrong any doubters of the franchise’s vitality (despite getting softer reviews from critics than the first two entries).

After 18 days, Fire and Ash blew past the $1 billion mark globally and — like the first two films and Cameron’s Titanic — showed his epics have unusually long legs. InNorth America, Fire and Ash finished the weekend with a domestic total of $303 million after earning a better-than-expected $40 million.

Fire and Ash hit the billion-dollar mark a bit slower than The Way of Water (which crossed it after 14 days). The first film made an incredible $2.9 billion and the sequel hit $2.3 billion. Fire and Ash is expected to end up somewhere shy of The Way of Water, but still, it’s tough to imagine Disney wanting to shelve any franchise that’s so easily hurdling over the $1 billion mark.