The new the Avatar 2 trailer featured just one line of dialogue from Jake Sully himself: “wherever we go,” Sully says, “this family is our fortress.”
Besides emphasizing the greater focus the Avatar sequels will have on the Sully family, Cameron has also said that the Avatar sequels are meant to be standalone stories. While Cameron and producer Jon Landau have said that there will still be an overreaching storyline to the saga, it seems that that connective thread between films will likely be the Sully family itself. As such, it feels like singling out this one line of dialogue in the Avatar 2 trailer feels significant.
Jake’s insistence that, wherever they go, the Sully family will stick together suggests that Cameron’s Avatar sequels will take place across multiple locations, with the Sully family as the main connecting throughline across sequels. This idea has already been suggested with The Way of Water, which will use Pandora’s oceans as its backdrop, a locale unable to be explored previously as Avatar’s water-based motion capture technology was (until recently) not up to par. If the primary setting and the Avatar: The Way of Water's new trailer is anything to go off of, it feels likely that the Sully family’s biome and planet-hopping adventures may provide the backdrop for the other 3 Avatar sequels in turn.
While little of the plot of The Way of Water has been teased, Landau and Cameron have suggested that the reemergence of an old threat will come to displace the Sully family. This suggests that perhaps the Resources Development istration (or RDA) might come back to Pandora from Earth to wreak havoc once again. This, of course, perfectly sets up the location change from Pandora’s surface to Pandora’s oceans in Avatar 2, with the Sully family relocating to avoid and then fight back against the RDA (who are also working with the Na’vi). But, beyond the standalone story of Avatar 2, the conflict in the first sequel might later set up an even bigger shift in Avatar 3.
Even if the initial conflict with the RDA is resolved in a standalone manner in The Way of Water (like Landau and Cameron have suggested), perhaps the Na’vi will realize they need to take the battle to Earth. This could, in turn, be setting up the Sully family to leave Pandora for the yet to be titled Avatar 3. Perhaps, even with other interplanetary stops along the way, the Avatar franchise can even take audiences back to the dystopian Earth presented in the original Avatar film, so long as Jake and Neytiri (and their son) remain as the core dynamic of the franchise.
Regardless of how exactly Cameron and Landau plan to execute this idea, it’s clear that the Sully family is important to the overall development of the Avatar saga. By singling out this line of dialogue from Jake in the Avatar 2 trailer, the film’s producer and director seem to be trying to clue their audience into the thematic resonance of Jake and Neytiri’s central dynamic. Wherever the Avatar sequels take audiences next, with these characters at the forefront, the franchise will have solid ground to walk upon.
