Skip to main content

Avatar: The Way of Water trailer highlights Pandora in all its beauty

Ahead of the film’s release date next month, 20th Century Studios released the official trailer for the highly anticipated Avatar: The Way of Water. The trailer features breathtaking visuals of Pandora, including stunning ocean footage, and teases an impending conflict for the Na’vi.

The sequel to 2009’s Avatar is set more than 10 years after the events in the first film. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is now fully a member of the Na’vi, and with his partner, Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), had four children together. However, trouble is on the horizon as outside forces attempt to destroy Pandora once again. It’s a battle for survival as Jake tries to save his family and his new world from destruction.

Avatar: The Way of Water | Official Trailer

Alongside Worthington and Saldaña, notable cast members returning for the sequel are Stephen Lang and Sigourney Weaver. Lang reprises his role as the villainous Colonel Miles Quaritch, who died in Avatar but returns as a Na’vi avatar. Weaver will play a new character named Kiri, the adoptive daughter of Jake and Neytiri. Other cast members include Kate Winslet, Cliff Curtis, Joel David Moore, Giovanni Ribisi, Edie Falco, Michelle Yeoh, Oona Chaplin, and Vin Diesel.

James Cameron returns to co-write and direct the very world that he created. With Cameron at the helm, Avatar became the highest-grossing film of all time with a worldwide box office gross of just under $3 billion. Avatar: The Way of Water is the first of four planned sequels that are set to come out in 2022, 2024, 2026, and 2028, respectively.

Two Na'vi characters stand in the water in a scene from Avatar: The Way of Water.
Photo by 20th Century Studios/20th Century Studios - © 2022 20th Century Studios

Avatar: The Way of Water arrives in theaters on December 16.

Editors' Recommendations

Dan Girolamo
Dan is a passionate and multitalented content creator with experience in pop culture, entertainment, and sports. Throughout…
The best characters in Avatar: The Way of Water, ranked
Two Na'vi characters stand in the water in a scene from Avatar: The Way of Water.

With every day that passes, Avatar: The Way of Water continues to prove that the first Avatar had more staying power than most people thought. The movie is making quite a bit of money, and it's also been pretty warmly received by both critics and the general public.

While the movie's incredible effects definitely take center stage, The Way of Water also has a number of memorable characters, some of which are introduced for the first time in this movie. At over three hours long, The Way of Water has plenty of time for multiple characters to get full arcs, but these were the seven best characters, either new or returning, to show up in the film.
7. Neytiri

Read more
Avatar: The Way of Water’s ending explained
Two Na'vi characters stand in the water in a scene from Avatar: The Way of Water.

After a long 13-year wait, the sequel to James Cameron's Avatar has finally premiered in theaters, and it was worth the wait. Taking place more than a decade after the original film, Jake Sully continues to battle the RDA on Pandora as a member of the alien Na'vi. He and his mate, Neytir,i have started their family -- they have two sons, Neteyam and Lo'ak; a daughter, Tuk; an adoptive daughter, Kiri; and an adoptive human son, "Spider" (so yeah, they've been very busy parents).

While the many years of waiting may have seen audiences' enthusiasm for the sequel dwindle, this new film is sure to bring them all back to Pandora with groundbreaking visuals, more worldbuilding, and a heartfelt story that sets up an epic future for the franchise. There's so much packed into the film's whopping 192-minute runtime, and it only lays the foundation for a much bigger story by the time it all ends.
Return to Pandora

Read more
James Cameron’s sci-fi epic Avatar returns to theaters, but has its magic faded?
Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana fall in love on Pandora.

There were plenty of reasons to wonder, in the autumn of 2009, if James Cameron had finally flown too close to the sun, burning a big budget on a boondoggle. Nearly a dozen years after emerging from a troubled production with the biggest movie of all time, the disaster-weepie phenomenon Titanic, the blockbuster maestro had once more secured enormous investment in pursuit of a bank-busting special-effects spectacle to rule them all. Except this time, the movie in question looked, from a distance, like the height of overreaching silliness: A sci-fi fantasy about a species of lithe, ocean-blue, vaguely feline aliens, prancing through a tropical paradise. The first trailer prompted chortles. Cameron, however, would have the last laugh.

Avatar, like Titanic before it, did more than silence the skeptics. It vindicated all the grand, hubristic ambition of its creator, at least from a commercial standpoint. Somehow, Cameron had done it again, and unbelievably surpassed the box-office success of his last conquest of the record books. Avatar, a hodgepodge of science fiction tropes in a cutting-edge package, was the big-screen event that everyone had to attend. Globally speaking, it quickly became the biggest movie of all time — a title it lost a decade later to Avengers: Endgame, then won again thanks to a rerelease in Chinaduring the pandemic. Even adjusted for inflation, the movie sits toward the top of the all-time charts.

Read more