Director James Cameron is known for being ambitious, but even he can’t seem to rush an Avatar sequel out before at least 2015.

Famed Avatar director James Cameron has recently purchased a 2,500 acre plot of land in New Zealand to the tune of an estimated $16 million. Of course he’s most “…anxious to throw on a scuba tank and get down there,” when discussing Lake Pouni, which is located in the center of the land he’s purchased. Obviously there have been rumors of Avatar 2 taking place in the waters of an alien planet, as he also recently took a submarine to the bottom of the Mariana Trench for inspiration.

Although Sigourney Weaver stated recently that Cameron would be taking on three Avatar films all at once in the near future, this seems to contradict the timeline that Cameron has now hinted at.

From his recent interview with The New York Times, it’s fairly obvious that he’s still working on the screenplays and once that’s finished, he’ll still need to make the time-consuming move to New Zealand, where he plans to live for at least 18 months while he shoots the sequels.

Obviously, any time New Zealand is brought up, director Peter Jackson isn’t too far behind, and this remains true during Cameron’s recent interview. He will be shooting all of Avatar‘s sequels at Peter Jackson’s Wellington Studios and will be using his visual effects company Weta Digital to complete the majority of the visual effects shots.

Despite the majority of the film work being done in New Zealand, the motion capture work for the Avatar sequels will be shot on the sound stages in California that James Cameron revealed a few months back. This will obviously be a daunting shoot, assuming the majority of the shots will be underwater, which should be quite the task for the motion capture team and the actors involved.

What we do know is when asked about a fourth Avatar film, Cameron expressed that it felt very premature to discuss more than the next two Avatar sequels, but that he “hasn’t ruled it out either.”

So what do you think about having to wait an estimated three years before an Avatar sequel? Is James Cameron biting off more than he can chew or do we still have faith in the director that seemingly revolutionized CGI and sparked the 3D film fascination?