ROME, ITALY - JULY 10: Michelle Rodriguez attends 'Couture / Sculpture' Vernissage Cocktail honoring Azzedine Alaia in the history of fashion as part of AltaRoma AltaModa Fashion Week Fall/Winter 2015/16 at Galleria Borghese on July 10, 2015 in Rome, Italy. (Photo by Elisabetta Villa/Getty Images) (2015 Getty Images)
Michelle Rodriguez will not be returning to the world of Pandora.
The Dominican-American actress confirmed to the New York Post that she will not be in the next installment of the sci-fi epic “Avatar.”
She said that director James Cameron did not ask her to appear in the sequel slated for a 2017 release.
“They’re bringing back a lot of other characters. I know (Sigourney Weaver is) coming back and the guy who played the bad guy (Stephen Lang) is coming back,” she said at Gabriela Cadena fashion show on Monday. “But yeah, I’m not gonna be in it.”
Fellow Dominican actress Zoe Saldaña will reprise her role as Na’vi huntress Neytiri alongside Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully, the wheelchair-bound Marine who finds new life on the alien world of Pandora.
Cameron has planned three sequels for “Avatar” with the first coming in 2017 and other two subsequently following. Initially it was planned for next year, but the Oscar-winning director revealed in January that it had to be pushed back because of complexity of writing them.
"There's a layer of complexity in getting the story to work as a saga across three films that you don't get when you're making a stand-alone film," Cameron told the Associated Press while in Wellington, New Zealand, where he was helping promote the local film industry earlier this year.
Released in 2009, "Avatar" became the highest-grossing film in history, with a box office take of nearly $2.8 billion. It also won three Academy Awards.
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