Alita: Battle Angel 2 Gains Momentum With James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez at the Helm

If you have been patiently flying the Alita flag since 2019, here is the update you have been waiting for: James Cameron says he and Robert Rodriguez are actively moving on Alita: Battle Angel 2, and they might even be sketching a path to a third movie. Yes, finally, real momentum.

Why it has taken this long

Alita: Battle Angel was that rare case where the overseas audience absolutely carried the day. Domestically, it topped out just under 86 million dollars. Internationally, it added another 319 million. That brings the worldwide total to almost 405 million on a 170 million dollar production budget. Respectable, but not a slam dunk. And Hollywood has a long memory for cautionary tales. For context: 2017's The Mummy actually made more money on a smaller budget and still managed to tank Universal's grand monster-universe plan. So a quick greenlight for Alita 2 was never going to be automatic.

• Studio shuffle: The first film was a 20th Century Fox release, and Fox got absorbed by Disney shortly after Alita hit theaters. New owners usually re-evaluate everything.
• Cameron being Cameron: He has been deep in the Avatar sequels assembly line, which eats up a lot of oxygen and time.
• Math and optics: 405 million worldwide on a 170 million budget is solid, but not the kind of no-brainer that forces an immediate sequel.

All that said, the creative team has never been shy about wanting back in. Rodriguez, Cameron, and star Rosa Salazar have all said they are ready to return to Iron City. It has just been a matter of timing and studio appetite.

The new movement

In a fresh chat with Empire, Cameron put a pin in the rumors and actually said the quiet part out loud. This is the bit to hang on your wall:

"I appreciate the loyalty of the Alita fans. Robert Rodriguez and I have sworn a blood oath to do at least one more Alita movie. In fact, we’re thinking of an architecture that bridges to a third film, but we’ll be satisfied if we can make one more. And we’re making progress on that. Now that I have a home in Austin, Texas, about three miles from [Robert’s] place, I think we’ll probably get more serious about that as soon as I wrap the (Avatar) mix here in a few weeks."

Two eyebrow-raisers there. One, the phrase blood oath — subtlety is dead and I kind of love it. Two, Cameron now has a home in Austin roughly three miles from Rodriguez. That proximity tends to speed things up. And the timing note is clear: once he finishes the current Avatar mix in the next few weeks, the Alita push gets more serious.

A quick refresher on the first film

Directed by Robert Rodriguez from a script by Laeta Kalogridis and producer James Cameron, Alita: Battle Angel adapts Yukito Kishiro's manga and jumps several centuries into the future. A compassionate cyber-doctor named Ido finds a discarded cyborg in the Iron City scrapyard, rebuilds her, and names her Alita. She wakes up with no memories and has to figure out who she is while navigating a very unfriendly city. Ido tries to shield her from whatever is lurking in her past, which, as you might recall, does not stay buried for long.

Bottom line

Six years after release, Cameron and Rodriguez are not just interested, they are actively moving the sequel forward and even thinking about a trilogy framework. No dates or start-of-shoot chatter yet, but between Cameron wrapping an Avatar mix in the coming weeks and the two filmmakers basically being neighbors in Austin, this feels like the most concrete progress Alita fans have gotten since 2019.

Are you up for Alita: Battle Angel 2, and maybe even a third? I am very ready to see Rosa Salazar back in that world.