Avatar: Fire and Ash was only released in cinemas on Friday and has already made $345 million worldwide.

Expected to join the $2 billion club alongside its two predecessors, it's hardly surprising Disney already have Avatar 4 and 5 release dates set for 2029 and 2031.

Speaking with io9, director James Cameron said of the next two films: "It's its own saga. It's got a beginning and a middle and an end that plays out across these two films. They're vaporware right now."

Although not committed to directing Avatar 4 just yet, the Oscar-winner has already filmed some of the yet-to-be-greenlit soft reboot. Before he died, producer Jon Landau said that due to the eight-year time jump in the first act of Avatar 4, a third of the film had to be shot to account for the child actors' ageing. Meanwhile, the upcoming fourth movie, which Cameron described as "a corker", had a jaw-dropping two-word response from the studio executives when he handed in the script

Cameron told Collider upon the release of Avatar 2: "I can't tell you the details, but all I can say is that when I turned in the script for [The Way of Water], the studio gave me three pages of notes. And when I turned in the script for 3, they gave me a page of notes, so I was getting better. When I turned in the script for 4, the studio executive, the creative executive over the films, wrote me an email that said, 'Holy f***.' And I said, 'Well, where are the notes?' And she said, 'Those are the notes.' Because it kind of goes nuts in a good way, right?"

Avatar 4 is set to release in cinemas on December 21, 2029 and Avatar 5 on December 19, 2031.