It’s an eternal struggle in any storytelling medium to be both accessible for newcomers and fulfilling enough for those who have been around from the very beginning. This is especially true for huge epics that are set to span multiple films or even multiple franchises. Next year, after a solid decade-plus of waiting, audiences will finally be able to see the sequel to Avatar…but what will the bar of entry be for this?

Will audiences be required to be intimately familiar with that first film or will director James Cameron allow Avatar 2 to be a film that requires little to no knowledge to jump into? Collider recently spoke with producer Jon Landau about that very thing. Here’s what the producer had to say:

“Each movie is a standalone movie that we would wanna go see. You don’t need to have seen the first Avatar to see Avatar 2. It sits there and we’re gonna take people on a visual and an emotional journey that comes to its own conclusion. Okay, step back. Is that a movie we would wanna make just as a standalone story? Yes. Now we do the same thing on Movie 3, Movie 4, and Movie 5. What we have the luxury of on Avatar is the world of Pandora. We get to keep it there but everything can be new, we’re not treading new ground.”

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This is quite interesting to me. While I was fully expecting Avatar 2 to be accessible on its own, I wasn’t expecting each movie to be a complete standalone experience. From day one, it seemed like James Cameron had a big epic story in mind, so the idea that you won’t need to know ANYTHING from the previous films is unique…and kind of refreshing.

In a world where we have a web of films interconnected in various ways, to be able to follow each film in a franchise in a standalone capacity is kind of nice and harkens back to films like Indiana Jones, which I’m all for.

Do you think this is a good idea? let us know your thoughts down in the comments! And follow me on Twitter at @JAMTheWriter!

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SOURCE: Collider