James Cameron says he is “still in the early stages” with Avatar sequels

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

The first of three planned sequels to 2009's AVATAR won't hit theaters until 2016, so we're going to be getting a lot of these kind of updates from James Cameron. In an interview with RTL, the director talked about his progress on the AVATAR sequels.

"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. 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."

Cameron also commented on how the new tech should help things move a little quicker for the upcoming movies.

"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."

Speaking of speeding things up, James Cameron went on to say 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."

James Cameron continued by saying he can tell any story he wants in the sequels because of the universe he built with the first movie.

"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."

I'm at least a little interested in revisiting Pandora. Visually the first film was amazing, but in my opinion the story was a bit weak. I'm not an AVATAR hater, however the movie has some flaws I just can't ignore. Obviously James Cameron is going to spend a ton of time working on the three sequels to AVATAR, and I really hope he spends the same amount of attention on the technology behind the films as he does working on the story.

AVATAR 2 is scheduled to be released in December 2016. The third and fourth films will roll into theaters in December 2017 and December 2018.