That’s right. The late Colonel Miles Quaritch, played by Stephen Lang, is somehow coming back for James Cameron’s Avatar sequel, and he’s going to be around for a long, long time.
In a new interview, Cameron himself said that Lang’s character—who was shot in the chest by not one but two very large arrows by Zoe Saldana’s Neytiri—will return as the villain all four Avatar sequels the director is planning:
The interesting conceit of the Avatar sequels is it’s pretty much the same characters. There are new characters and a lot of new settings and creatures, so I’m taking characters you know and putting them in unfamiliar places and moving them on this greater journey. But it’s not a whole bunch of new characters every time. There’s not a new villain every time, which is interesting. Same guy. Same motherfucker through all four movies. He is so good and he just gets better. I know Stephen Lang is gonna knock this out of the park.
To refresh, Quaritch was the head of security for the humans on Pandora. He leads an attack on the Na’vi at the end of the first film, is shot out of the sky, then puts on a badass mech suit to fight Jake (Sam Worthington). However, just as he’s about to defeat Jake, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) kills him. Seeing at Quaritch already hated the Na’vi with a passion, being murdered by them probably hasn’t improved his view of Pandora’s natives.
Lang was previously announced to come back for the sequels, along with Sigourney Weaver. whose character also died in the first movie. Earlier this week, actor Matt Gerald, who played one of the lead soldiers in the first film, was also announced as appearing in the sequels and, you guessed it, he died in the movie, too.
With all this resurrection, you have to wonder if some kind of resurrection device is going to be a major part of the plot in these sequels. Can the neural network on Pandora somehow interrupt death? Does the Avatar machine somehow make copies of people’s genetic code? Do the bad guys learn to tap into it?
We’ll have to wait a long time to wonder how this is going to play out. Cameron has still not started shooting the films, which have tentative release dates of December 18, 2020, December 17, 2021, December 20, 2024 and December 19, 2025.
In the meantime, you can just head to Disney World.
[Empire]