James Cameron Confirms You Won’t See Michelle Yeoh in Avatar Until 2029 at Least

Even before her Oscar win for Everything Everywhere All at Once, we were in the midst of a Michelle Yeoh boom time. Lucky for us, that’s not going to end anytime soon. While the first Wicked is hitting theaters this fall, Star Trek: Section 31 is arriving on Paramount+ early next year, and Prime Video’s Blade Runner 2099 is now in production, another high-profile Yeoh project—her involvement in James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar franchise—is further away than we thought.

That’s because Yeoh’s character isn’t actually going to appear in the third film, whose title was recently confirmed as Avatar: Fire and Ash. She’ll instead debut in the fourth film, which is due in 2029—a full decade after her casting as a scientist named Dr. Karina Mogue was announced back in 2019.

This tidbit was confirmed by no less than James Cameron himself, who told Entertainment Weekly at the D23 convention that Yeoh is not in part three—”that got a little bit misreported”—though she will indeed be in parts four and five.

“She will be coming in soon to do her part, which is an interesting, fun character,” Cameron said. “I mean, we’re getting ahead of ourselves now. This whole thing has been planned for years and years. The scripts were all written years ago, through the end of movie five. So we’ve been working on parts of four even as we go along, mostly because we’ve got this young cast. We had to shoot them all while they were still young.”

The EW article notes that a widely circulated photo of Yeoh on set with Cameron was taken while Avatar was filming its second and third entries back to back, along with the first part of the fourth, precisely because of those rapidly aging young stars. But though fans won’t see Yeoh in Fire and Ash, Cameron knows it’ll be worth the wait to see her in Avatar‘s world: “We love Michelle … She was always a movie star, but she’s blown up into a huge, huge phenomenon.”

Avatar: Fire and Ash opens December 19, 2025.

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