Avatar: Fire and Ash trailer is here to remind you that James Cameron will never stop making Avatar movies

It’s here, folks. The trailer for the third Fern Gully movie. Sorry, sorry, that should read Avatar.

James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash has released its first trailer ahead of its December release. The clip has playing ahead of cinema screenings of Fantastic Four: First Steps but it’s now available online.

It is, as you might expect, a montage of “Oh, look at what we can do with CGI!”, accompanied by an Enya-adjacent score.

Say what you will about the Avatar franchise’s anaemic scripts, repetitive story beats, dull characters and plodding runtimes, but if there’s one thing it does right, it’s the visual effects and world-building.

Pandora does, at least, look good. The second film expanded it to a water-based community and now the third will explore a fiery one. It is called Fire and Ash, after all.

Story details so far are scant – not that that’s really the point – but the trailer suggests some kind of showdown between the main Na’vi characters and a fire tribe who don’t have a lot of patience for the do-gooders.

There are some floating creatures/ships, scorched earth scenes and snippets of dialogue as profound as “my children!”, “if there’s something you can do, then you must do it” and “you cannot live like this, baby, in hate”. It’s the “baby” that really makes you want to die inside.

Cameron has not confirmed a runtime yet for this instalment but has in the past sounded off about audience impatience over long movies.

They actually did the filming for Avatar: Fire and Ash in 2020, back-to-back with The Way of Water, in large part because there is a live-action teenage character who would have over time, inconveniently, aged out of the role like the Stranger Things kids have.

OK, OK, snark aside, the Avatar movies are enormously commercially successful. Both have netted over $US2 billion each and, not adjusted for inflation, sit at numbers one and three of the top grossing movies of all time.

So, it certainly has an audience, and that box office gives Cameron the cover to do exactly what he wants and for as long as he wants to, which is make a further two Avatar sequels for a franchise totalling five films.

Unless Fire and Ash unexpectedly tanks with moviegoers, those future chapters are all but certain.

Cameron actually has a bunch of projects lined up for his post-Avatar life – The Devils, a fantasy movie based on Joe Abercrombie’s novel, and historical project about a real-life Japanese man who survived the atomic blasts at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But considering Cameron hasn’t made a non-narrative feature that wasn’t Avatar since Titanic in 1997, we’ll believe it when we see them.

Avatar: Fire and Ash is in cinemas on December 18