Avatar: The Way of Water almost got a Na'vi space battle. Here's why it didn't work out.

Avatar: The Way of Water ejected its main heroes out of the Pandoran jungles and into the ocean, where audiences met a whole new class of Na'vi and their aquatic neighbors. As far back as 2013, when director James Cameron first formed a writer's room to map out the franchise he wanted to build, the story looked a lot different.

Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, two of the scribes tapped to join that Avatar think tank with Josh Friedman and Shane Salerno, describe the various avenues they explored. One such track would have seen the Na'vi heading to outer space.

"There was one idea of a space battle with Navi," Jaffa tells EW in a joint interview with Silver, who together wrote the screenplay for Avatar: The Way of Water with Cameron. "That idea got a lot of traction, and we talked a lot about it. We were struggling, though. How would that work with the story that we're telling? Jim said, 'Well, give me a few weeks.' He went off and he wrote an entire script. And, by the way, a brilliant script."

The script seemed to go over well in the writer's room, despite the end result. "At the end of the day, the whole script got thrown out because it just didn't really work with the story we were telling," Jaffa adds.

Some of that material now lives in comic book form. Avatar: The High Ground, written by Sherri L. Smith, was published in three volumes and includes the story from that scrapped script, which takes place within the time jump that occurs at the beginning of The Way of Water.

According to Jaffa and Silver, the writers' room would often take an idea like that and explore it in earnest for a couple days to see if it would be viable for the story. "Some of them would be just minor things," Jaffa says, "a minor idea that we would dial down on. It could be anything, from a plot point to a character to a character beat."

"The idea was six months in a writers' room, and that we were going to break down beat by beat three movies, which would describe a larger saga, but each movie would be distinct," Silver recalls. "We didn't know which movie we were gonna write. We were gonna be invested in all of them and each beat of each movie. Then come Christmas [of 2013], Jim would tell us which movie we had and send us off to write, and he would work on writing each of the scripts with us."

Learning everything about the mythology of Pandora took about two weeks alone. Cameron came prepped with hundreds of pages of notes about how he saw the continuing Avatar movies, including characters and other environments on the moon.

The physical writers' room, Silver remembers, was filled with whiteboards. Think that Charlie Day gif from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. "I couldn't even account how many whiteboards," she says. "And then whiteboards that flip over and you can write on the back. By the end, you would walk into the room and it was a bit of a maze to find your way."

"Part of the luxury of working on this is that the room was a very safe room," Jaffa notes. "In other words, you could throw out any idea. You could debate any idea. You could express your opinion freely and not worry about being slapped down or being made fun." No idea would seem too "out there" or bizarre, not even something like the tulkun, which are not quite whales but also they're not not quite whales.

Admittedly, they had a lot to work with. Perhaps too much to work with. The treatment for what would become The Way of Water began as one movie but soon became two. "Just tons and tons of material," Silver says. "The challenge was, how do we fit all this in and have it resonate emotionally by at the end of the movie and not be rushed? That's really how our movie — the first one — became two."

Avatar: The Way of Water picks up years after the events of the first film. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) has raised a family with Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), including eldest Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), rebellious Lo'ak (Britain Dalton), adopted daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), and the young tyke Tuk (Trinity Bliss). Spider (Jack Champion), the human child of Jake's mortal enemy Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang), remains close with the family, though Neytiri would never adopt him, seeing him always as the outsider.

The writers, including Cameron, didn't want to sacrifice the nuance of these dynamics, which influenced the decision to split the story into another movie. Silver points to the Spider-Kiri relationship as one example. "We'd been talking about that very detail, but now [written in the script] on the page, it was so alive," she says. "You didn't wanna cut that short. You wanted to let some of that stuff play out."

The main events of The Way of Water kick up when the Sullys, hunted by Quaritch, whose consciousness has now been uploaded to an Avatar body, take refuge with the Metkayina, the oceanic Na'vi tribe led by Ronal (Kate Winslet) and Tonowari (Cliff Curtis).

"Certain ideas were kind of terrifying," Silver admits. "Like all of a sudden we're gonna have a talking tulkun. This is new in the franchise. But Jim, when he sees something, he goes for it."

Cameron has previously mentioned the third Avatar film, which has already been filmed and is currently on the calendar for release on Dec. 20, 2024, will introduce "the Ash People," a new tribe of Na'vi that represent fire. "I would be scared to talk about the Ash People," says Silver, referring to spoilers.

"None of us hesitated at all when [Cameron] presented the idea. We all flipped out," Jaffa teases. "We all were like, 'Oh my God! It's fantastic.'"

What Silver will say: "There are huge surprises and expansion of worlds coming in 3 that make it feel very different."

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

Related content:

• James Cameron says Kate Winslet was 'super gung ho' to get back in a water tank for Avatar 2
• James Cameron says he can't 'wiggle out' of making more Avatar sequels after box office success
• James Cameron cut 10 minutes from Avatar: The Way of Water so as not to 'fetishize' gun violence