Avatar: The Way of Water introduces plenty of new characters, and one of them is Jack Champion's Spider, a young human boy who hangs out with his adoptive Na'vi family.
Since the blue Pandorans are brought to life via motion capture, that meant combining Na'vi and humans was particularly difficult – and led to Champion giving his entire performance twice over, two years apart.
"Well, the beauty was, we got to do it twice," director James Cameron told Vanity Fair. "So Russ [Carpenter, cinematographer] would light the scene, so everything that we did with Jack photographically, we did previously with him in terms of capture. So, Jack did his entire performance twice, once for all the other actors like Sigourney [Weaver] and Britain [Dalton] and Sam [Worthington], so that he was there kind of off camera."
The time to actually film Champion's scenes didn't come until two years had passed. "He was like 13 at the time. And then later when we shot, he was 15, so he changed in size and vocal range a bit, but we capped him and then we had these capture scenes," Cameron added.
Avatar 2 has already become one of the highest grossing movies of all time, and there are multiple sequels on the way – in fact, there will be five Avatar films in total. The third Avatar movie is set to introduce a new type of Na'vi, according to Cameron.
"The fire will be represented by the 'Ash People.' I want to show the Na'vi from another angle because, so far, I have only shown their good sides," he revealed.
Avatar 3 is set for release on December 20, 2024. Until then, check out our guide to all the upcoming major movie release dates to get planning your 2023 theater trips.
