James Cameron is a guy who likes to take his time in between film projects. He let seven years go by before he made the sequel to Terminator, and after Titanic he disappeared for over ten years, developing an adaptation of Battle Angel Alita (which he never made), and Avatar, which of course was released in 2009. Cameron is currently in New Zealand working on two sequels to Avatar, which he plans on filming back-to-back. After that, he says he still wants to make Battle Angel, and a fourth Avatar, which he says will be a prequel:
“I haven’t really put pen to paper on it, but basically it goes back to the early expeditions of Pandora, and kind of what went wrong with the humans and the Na’vi and what that was like to be an explorer and living in that world. Because when we drop in, even in the first film in ‘Avatar 1,’ as it will be known in the future, we’re dropping into a process that’s 35 years in to a whole colonization. That will complete an arc and if that leads into more, we’ll start, not imitating ‘Star Wars,’ but it’s a logical thing to do because we’ll have completed the thematic arc by the end of three. The only thing left to do is go back to see what it was like on those first expeditions and create some new characters that then become legacy characters in later films. It’s a plan.”
Regarding Battle Angel, Cameron’s co-producer Jon Landau said:
“We’ll focus on ‘Avatar’ for the next four or five years. Hopefully right after that… I am confident you will see it. It’s one of my favorite stories, I think it is an incredible story, a journey of self-discovery of a young woman. It is a movie that begs the question: ‘What does it mean to be human? Are you human if you have a heart, are you human if you have a mind, are you human if you have a soul?’ And I look forward to bringing that film to audiences.”
Cameron is already way behind schedule on the two Avatar sequels, which have been pushed back a year to December 2014 for part two, and December 2015 for part three. If he takes another five or six years to get around to Avatar 4, that means he won’t even start production on Battle Angel until 2020 at the earliest. By that point, Cameron will be 65, and will likely be the wealthiest director of all-time. He might be too busy sitting on a throne of gold-plated stacks of 100 dollar bills and ruling over 75% of New Zealand to make movies.
About the Author
Jeff Carter
Jeff is the defining voice of his generation. Sadly, that generation exists only in an alternate dimension where George Lucas became supreme overlord of the Earth in 1979 and replaced every television broadcast and theatrical film on the planet with Star Wars and Godzilla movies. In this dimension, he’s just a guy from New England who likes writing snarky things about superheroes, monsters, and robots.
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