With every day that passes, fans might be getting closer to another Alita: Battle Angel film.
During a recent conversation between Robert Rodriguez (Sin City) and James Cameron (Aliens) for Variety, the filmmakers made a promise to each other to one day reunite and make another installment of a 2019 sci-fi movie Rodriguez directed and Cameron co-wrote and co-produced.
“Hey, let’s make another Alita film,” Cameron tells Rodriguez over a video call where the directors were discussing Cameron’s latest film, Avatar: The Way of Water. “What do you say?” Rodriguez responds: “Yeah, let’s do that!”
Then, Cameron and Rodriguez each placed a hand towards the camera and swore a “blood oath” to one other that it would happen.
Alita: Battle Angel, which is based on a Japanese manga, follows a disembodied teenage cyborg named Alita (Rosa Salazar), who is discovered in a scrapyard in the year 2563 and pieced back together by a cyberphysician. When hired assassins are sent to destroy her, Alita begins to learn about her complex past.
Earlier in their conversation, Cameron discussed his experience working with Rodriguez on the film. “I gave you 600 pages of notes on Alita – about the world and how cyborgs work,” he said. “I don’t know how helpful any of that was, but that’s my process. I try to get to a granular level of what it’s like to live in that world.”
Cameron also told Rodriguez something that their mutual friend, fellow filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (Pinocchio), once told him about how Mexican filmmakers support one another. “Our pal Guillermo says that in Mexico, when somebody makes a film, all the other filmmakers gather around like a baby was being born,” Cameron said. “They all get involved in the process. And I think that’s the way it should be.”
We’ll take Rodriguez and Cameron at their word and assume a sequel or prequel to Alita: Battle Angel is somewhere in their future. Until then, Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water premieres at theaters Friday (December 16), while Rodriguez’s next film, Hypnotic, which stars Ben Affleck, is in post-production but does not have a release date yet.