As if we hadn’t already waited long enough for James Cameron’s Avatar sequel, now it has been pushed back a whole year more.
Avatar fans, prepare for hibernation: the first part of James Cameron’s new Avatar trilogy (which starts with a sequel, but we guess “quadrilogy” isn’t a very buzzworthy term) has been pushed back from Christmas 2016 to Christmas 2017. That’s almost three years away!
Cameron confirmed this in an interview with AP, reported by Deadline.
The director admitted in the interview that his projected 2016 release date was “too ambitious,” not only because of the script, but due to all the 3D and special effects work the team has to complete. “It took me six months to write the first and we’re writing three altogether,” Cameron explains.
Supposedly, this added delay is good news, as it means Cameron is really taking his time with this story — which he has previously claimed will make you “sh** yourself with your mouth wide open.”
“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 says of his new trilogy.
“We’re writing three simultaneously. And we’ve done that so that everything tracks throughout the three films. We’re not just going to do one and then make up another one and another one after that and parallel with that, we’re doing all the design [now].”
After Avatar 2, the third and fourth movie in the series will be released in 2018 and 2019 respectively… until they decide to split the final film into two movies, that is. We’re calling it right now.
The first Avatar movie aired back in 2009, which means a whooping eight years between parts one and two.
We wonder if this timespan will be explained in the movie, which will presumably feature some of the same actors — but then again, both Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) are now Na’vi, so the age difference probably won’t be that noticeable under the layers of CGI.