NEED TO KNOW
- Avatar: Fire and Ash is “particularly timely,” Sigourney Weaver tells PEOPLE at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival
- Director James Cameron’s Pandora is “not an easy world,” she says, adding, “neither is ours”
- The Avatar franchise mirrors Weaver’s new movie Dust Bunny, she says, as both are about kids who “have to demand much more of themselves than they ever thought was possible”
Sigourney Weaver is teasing an Avatar sequel that’s as “timely” as it is epic.
Speaking at the PEOPLE/EW and Shutterstock studio at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival on Monday, Sept. 8, the star of Dust Bunny says fans of James Cameron’s franchise can expect to see reflections of our own world in the coming installments.
“Each of these [Avatar] films,” says Weaver, 75, has the “same themes of family and trying to stick together and protecting your home. But the stories themselves really wrench you into another world.”
Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third installment, “seems particularly timely,” teases the actress, who will reprise her role as Kiri, adopted daughter of Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully and Zoe Saldaña’s Neytiri.
The same timeliness is a theme in “the next one,” she adds, referring to the fourth of five Avatar movies, scheduled for Dec. 21, 2029.
“It’s not an easy world,” says Weaver of Pandora. “And neither is ours.”
In writer-director Bryan Fuller’s Dust Bunny (in theaters Dec. 12), Weaver joins Sophie Sloan, Mads Mikkelsen and David Dastmalchian in a “macabre fairy tale,” per a synopsis, about a girl convincing a hit man to slay the parent-devouring monster lurking under her bed.
Sloan’s young character Aurora, Weaver tells PEOPLE, is not unlike the Na’vi children introduced in 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water. “You see these kids have to demand much more of themselves than they ever thought was possible,” she says. “I find the [Avatar] films so personal and so inspiring.”
Cameron, 71, wrote all five planned Avatar installments “quite a long time ago,” she adds, but “all five of them hold together and build and play off in the most extraordinary ways… [Fire and Ash] sets up 4 and 5, but of course, it’s its own adventure.”
The Oscar-winning Titanic director told PEOPLE in February 2024 that with the five films “fully written,” there is a possibility of more Avatars. “We’re fully written through movie five, and I’ve got ideas for 6 and 7, although I’ll probably be handing the baton on at that point,” he teased at the time. “I mean, mortality catches up.”
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Following its Sept. 8 Toronto premiere, Dust Bunny is in theaters Dec. 12. Avatar: Fire and Ash is in theaters Dec. 19.
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