James Cameron plans Avatar 4 as a prequel and Battle Angel Alita in 2017?

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

Boy, when James Cameron said that he is now “in the Avatar business,” he really wasn’t kidding.  A second, third, and fourth follow-up to AVATAR have been planned for a while now, with the second and third being shot back to back.  That fourth film was always a mystery though – a mystery, that is, until now.  And it seems that Hollywood has, in a way, learned from Paul’s critique a last month regarding trilogies.  In a way.  

Whatever it ends up being called, the fourth film to bear the AVATAR name will be prequel. “I have an idea for a fourth.  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.  [Avatar 3] 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.”

The reason we haven’t had the new AVATAR film yet, besides Cameron having to write “two scripts together as one big thing,” has to do with how the last two years have been spent “refining the whole pipeline.  It was a hideously complex process to make that film and a lot has been said about that, but we don’t want it to be done in the same prototypical way as the first one, we want it to be a much smoother workflow just for creativity reasons.”

So what are your thoughts on an AVATAR prequel? Did you ever care enough about the world of the characters? Does this mean we’ll get more Stephen Lang? If things go as planned, which they never do, perhaps we’ll be finding out sooner rather than later considering how the first sequel to AVATAR could be arriving as early as Christmas of 2014 (though probably later than that at this point).

On the other side of things there’s BATTLE ANGEL, a project Cameron constantly maintains he is still interested in doing that tells the tale of an amnesiac cyborg named Alita who is found in a garbage heap and rebuilt.  Her one memory is of a fighting style called “Panzer Kunst,” and it is from there that she begins her quest to regain her memory and discover just who and what she is.  Now despite Cameron being “in the Avatar business,” producing partner Jon Landau very much thinks that BATTLE ANGEL is still going to happen (as revealed by Swedish website MovieZine):

On the story: 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.

On the casting: Who we would want to cast today, and who we would want to cast when we get down to making the film, might be two totally different people who would be right for the role.

On when the movie might be made: We’ll focus on Avatar for the next four or five years, hopefully right after that.

So there you have it – two projects, and plenty of information on both that we didn’t have before.  What do you think the chances are that we’ll actually get Cameron’s rendition BATTLE ANGEL?

This piece of phenomenal BATTLE ANGEL art comes from long time reader and site fan Joe Boccia – you can check out his Deviant Art page right here