(Source ComingSoon.net)

Yup, you read that right – James Cameron is planning Avatar sequels. Plural. There is said to be an Avatar trilogy coming our way. The director stated that there will be the first of three Avatar sequels hitting theatres as soon as December 2016, with the next two coming out in the following years (Avatar III coming in 2017 & Avatar IV coming in 2018). Much like Peter Jackson’s very impressive Lord Of The Rings & Hobbit trilogies maintaining the process of being filmed at once, and coming out just about a year after each other for three consecutive years, James Cameron will be doing the same with a brand new Avatar trilogy.

James Cameron, in an interview with RTL (via MarketSaw), gave some updates about the upcoming three sequels for Avatar.

“We’re still in the early stages. Right now we’re developing the software. I’m writing the scripts. We’re designing all the creatures and characters and the settings, and so on. So, I’m not actually directing yet, but I’m doing all the other creative processes that lead up to that,” Cameron said.

He continued to say that he thinks “it’s going very well. I think it’s going to be spectacular. You’ll see new worlds, new habitats, new cultures. The primary conflict between the human view kind of dominating nature and the Na’vi view of being integrated into nature is the same, but it manifests itself in very different ways.”

Since the first Avatar movie, they’ve been able to reduce production time. “The first film… took almost four years to make. We expect to be able to accelerate the process quite a bit, because we’ve improved a lot of the software and the computer graphics tools, and we’ve been working very closely with Weta Digital down here in New Zealand developing a whole new suite of tools to speed up the process.”

Cameron also said they are “looking at high frame rate. I’m studying that. I haven’t made a final decision yet, whether the entire film will be made at high frame rate or parts of it. You know, we’ll be shooting at a native resolution of probably 4K and so then there should be a lot of true 4K theaters by then as well.”

That makes the question what will be the plot? “The thing that’s great about ‘Avatar,’ it’s such a rich world, I can explore any theme or any idea that I want. Once you’ve got the characters that an audience loves, it’s great to surprise them and make changes and turns that they don’t expect. And you don’t have to spend so much time of the movie setting up all that stuff, because the audience will remember from the previous film.”

Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana & Stephen Lang have (mentioned their involvement in the upcoming trilogy) but have yet to officially sign on, but it’s assumed they’ll return.

So what do you think of this news? Can you handle another three Avatar movies? Should there be anymore or was the first one a perfect one-off?

Let us know below!

2/18/2014 – 9:46 am

by James