The Avatar video games are canon, but don’t tie into the Avatar movies

With Avatar: The Way of Water — the long-delayed sequel to James Cameron’s groundbreaking 2009 movie Avatar —Finally hitting the theaters, many fans might be curious about how this latest wave of tie-ins or spinoffs may tie into the promised five movie series. Only three of them have reportedly been shot.

Ubisoft’s Frontiers of Pandora: The Avatar The release was initially announced in 2021. It was then delayed to July 2023 in order to release the film in March 2023. Avatar: Reckoning, an MMO designed for mobile devices, was also planned for a 2022 release, but currently doesn’t have a release date.Water is the Way Producer Jon Landau shared details with Polygon about the games and said that there will be no storyline crossovers with them. Water is the WayOr other Avatar films.

“We don’t want the stories to be told together,” Landau said. “This is where we differentiate [from other multimedia franchises]. We want the stories to be unique in each of these spaces.”

Landau says the thinking around Avatar franchise spinoffs is that they should all be set in different arenas, so companies producing games — or Avatar comics, or even more divergent projects, like Cirque du Soleil’s Avatar show, Toruk, the First Flight — have more freedom to tell their own stories.

“We don’t have creative content coming out in the visual medium so rapidly as other IPs do,” Landau said. “It’s not like, Let’s do a streaming series, and another streaming series, and a sequel one year later, and all those things. That’s just not who we are. We don’t want that for Avatar. We want to find and challenge the best brand partners to expand our universe. We’re doing that now with Massive and Ubisoft.”

Landau, as well as James Cameron, co-producer and director, want all of these stories to align. “We want what we do in these spaces to become canon in our world. So they cannot do something that conflicts with our stories,” Landau said.

For the games, that means setting the action outside or around the movies’ storyline. “Frontiers of Pandora takes place in the western frontier of Pandora,” Landau explains. “That’s not somewhere we’ve gone before. This takes place within the following timeframe The Way of Water: Avatar opens, but before the one-year time cut in the movie.”

First Avatar movie, 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 organization trying to mine resources from Pandora. The beginning of Water is the WayThe RDA, led by General Ardmore, a military leader and antagonist of the Dark Horse graphic novels series, returns to Pandora. The High Ground: Avatar.

“Frontiers of Pandora is consistent with the movie, in that it talks about characters that come back with the RDA,” Landau says. “General Ardmore is talked about in the game, but they’re back at the Bridgehead base, not at the frontier. It’s just like we did with [Disney theme-park land] The World of Avatar, which takes place in the Valley of Mo’ara. It’s not a place we see in the movies — it deals with the Omaticaya [clan of Na’vi], on a river that we’ve never seen in the movies. It takes place 2 generations after the events in the original film. We see Samson’s wrecked ship and other destroyed gunships hidden within the forest. These are retaken by the forest. These are the realities. [franchise spinoffs] are not telling our story.”

The Way of Water: AvatarPremieres at theaters Dec. 16 Frontiers of Pandora: The AvatarIn March 2023, it will arrive at Amazon Luna and PlayStation 5, Windows PCs, as well as Xbox Series X, in March 2023. Avatar: ReckoningIt is not expected to be released until the end of this year, but it has been developed for iOS as well as Android platforms.