Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is movie canon and takes place during The Way of Water's time skip

Ubisoft's Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is still quite some distance from release, but now we have confirmation that it's canon and taking place during the events of The Way of Water.

It shouldn't come as much surprise that the game is canon – after all, everything from 2009's Avatar: The Game to Cirque du Soleil's Toruk: The First Flight are still part of the story – but a new interview with producer Jon Landau sheds some light on how the filmmakers are treating adaptations in other media. Mostly, they don't want them to be adaptations at all. They want new stories that take place in unexplored parts of the fictional universe.

To that end, "Frontiers of Pandora takes place in the western frontier of Pandora," Landau tells Polygon. "That’s not somewhere we’ve gone before. It takes place in the timeframe after Avatar: The Way of Water opens, but before the one-year time cut in the movie."

Landau explains that "General Ardmore is talked about in the game, but they’re back at the Bridgehead base, not at the frontier. It’s just like we did with [Disney theme-park land] The World of Avatar, which takes place in the Valley of Mo’ara."

Ubisoft hasn't had much to say about Frontiers of Pandora since the game was properly unveiled at E3 2021. The game is currently due to launch sometime between April 2023 and March 2024, so we've got quite a wait ahead of us.

Check out our Avatar: The Way of Water review if you're on the fence about seeing James Cameron's latest epic.