The Avatar video video games are canon, however don’t tie into the Avatar motion pictures

With Avatar: The Method of Water — the long-delayed sequel to James Cameron’s groundbreaking 2009 film Avatar — lastly hitting theaters, followers could also be questioning how the brand new wave of tie-ins and spinoffs may tie into the promised five-movie series, three of which have already reportedly been shot.

Ubisoft’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora was announced in 2021 for launch this 12 months, then delayed in July for a planned March 2023 release. Avatar: Reckoning, an MMO designed for mobile devices, was additionally deliberate for a 2022 launch, however at the moment doesn’t have a launch date. The Method of Water producer Jon Landau not too long ago shared some particulars concerning the video games with Polygon, and confirmed that neither may have any storyline crossover with The Method of Water or different Avatar motion pictures.

“We don’t need the tales to be informed collectively,” Landau stated. “That is the place we differentiate [from other multimedia franchises]. We wish the tales to be distinctive in every of those areas.”

Landau says the pondering round Avatar franchise spinoffs is that they need to all be set in several arenas, so firms producing video games — or Avatar comics, or much more divergent initiatives, like Cirque du Soleil’s Avatar present, Toruk: The First Flight — have extra freedom to inform their very own tales.

“We don’t have inventive content material popping out within the visible medium so quickly as different IPs do,” Landau stated. “It’s not like, Let’s do a streaming sequence, and one other streaming sequence, and a sequel one 12 months later, and all these issues. That’s simply not who we’re. We don’t need that for Avatar. What we wish to do is locate the most effective in model companions, and develop the universe by difficult them to do what they do greatest. We’re doing that now with Huge and Ubisoft.”

On the identical time, Landau and co-producer, director, and author James Cameron wish to be sure all these divergent tales align. “We wish what we do in these areas to develop into canon in our world. So they can’t do one thing that conflicts with our tales,” Landau stated.

For the video games, meaning setting the motion outdoors or across the motion pictures’ storyline. “Frontiers of Pandora takes place within the western frontier of Pandora,” Landau explains. “That’s not someplace we’ve gone earlier than. It takes place within the timeframe after Avatar: The Method of Water opens, however earlier than the one-year time minimize within the film.”

Within the first Avatar film, the Na’vi — the catlike humanoids native to the world of Pandora — resist and drive off the human incursion represented by the RDA, or Resources Development Administration, the militaristic group attempting to mine assets from Pandora. In the beginning of The Method of Water, the RDA returns to Pandora, headed by army chief Normal Ardmore, an antagonist within the film and the Darkish Horse graphic novel sequence Avatar: The Excessive Floor.

“Frontiers of Pandora is in line with the film, in that it talks about characters that come again with the RDA,” Landau says. “Normal Ardmore is talked about within the sport, however they’re again on the Bridgehead base, not on the frontier. It’s identical to we did with [Disney theme-park land] The World of Avatar, which takes place within the Valley of Mo’ara. It’s not a spot we see within the motion pictures — it offers with the Omaticaya [clan of Na’vi], on a river that we’ve by no means seen within the motion pictures. And it takes place two generations after the occasions of the primary movie, so we see wrecked Samson and different wrecked gunships within the forest. We see the forest retaking these. However these [franchise spinoffs] aren’t telling our story.”

Avatar: The Method of Water premieres in theaters on Dec. 16. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is coming to Amazon Luna, PlayStation 5, Home windows PC, and Xbox Sequence X in March 2023. Avatar: Reckoning doesn’t have a projected launch date, and is being developed for iOS and Android platforms.