Entertainment Weekly has given readers a first look at the new cast of “Avatar 2”. And what better place to introduce the future stars of the franchises then at Animal Kingdom’s Pandora – The World Of Avatar. Principal photography for “Avatar 2” began this Monday and the movie is scheduled to hit theaters on December 18, 2020.

From EW:

Of course, in the above photo, you’ll have to use your imagination a bit to picture the cast in CG character as lanky blue cat-eyed Na’vi. That is, with one exception — Javier “Spider” Socorro (played by 12-year-old Jack Champion, who’s standing on the right in a blue shirt in the above photo). Spider is a human teenager born at the Hell’s Gate military complex, a crucial location in the first film.

According to producer Jon Landau, the kids of Avatar 2 represent the biggest focus shift from the original movie. “We never had this youthful element before, and that brings a different kind of energy to the film,” he says. “They represent the future generation of Pandora and play a very significant role — not just in this movie but throughout all the movies.”

Director James Cameron has famously spent years working on the scripts for the four Avatar sequels. The first is scheduled to hit theaters on Dec. 18, 2020. That hiatus is nearly as long as the 12 years between Cameron’s Titanic and Avatar — and the filmmaker proved skeptics wrong once Avatar passed Titanic as the highest-grossing film of all time. Landau remarks that Avatar 2 will silence any doubters who dismissed the first title as a one-time 3-D sensation.

“Nobody is watching Avatar [on home video] or waiting in four-hour lines at Disney’s World of Avatar or going to the sold-out Cirque du Soleil shows because of the film’s 3-D,” he points out. “People respond because of the movie’s characters, themes, and emotions—and we have all that again. When the cast read what Jim Cameron wrote [for the sequels], it hit them with even greater resonance than the first movie.”

Source: EW