James Cameron wants you to remember that those Avatar sequels are important

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

2009 seems like it happened forever ago, doesn’t it? Granted it’s only six years, but six years can be a long time when so much has happened in between. And with that comes discussion of AVATAR, which, at the time, was the biggest thing on the planet and yet now, even with that incredible box office performance in the books, feels like an afterthought.

And to think… we’ve got three more sequels coming.

Is anyone going to care by the time they eventually arrive? James Cameron sure as hell will, and he’s going to do everything he can to make sure they stay important to you, too. Speaking to the Montreal Gazette in advance of a new Cirque Du Soleil show that serves as a AVATAR prequel of sorts, Cameron once again laid out what the plan is for these next few films and how awesome it’s all going to be.

Christmas of ’17 is the target. At least, that’s what we’ve announced. But I don’t consider that to be as important as the fact that when we get all three films done, we drop them a year apart. I call it a meta-narrative that runs across the three movies. Each film stands alone, but it also tells one much larger story. We have design more or less finished, which is an enormous task. It’s been about a two-year task. (We’ve finished) all the creatures and the landscapes, and the new worlds within the world of Pandora that you see. The writing is ongoing, but almost finished. Technical development is done. Stages are done. Infrastructure. So we’re really poised to start after the first of the year.

Production in 2016. First sequel by Christmas 2017. Got it.

But allow me to play Devil’s advocate for a moment… simply to make things interested as we all suffer through THE FORCE AWAKENS hangover.

What if Lucasfilm and Disney look at the box office performance of this year’s STAR WARS and next year’s ROGUE ONE and determines that perhaps December is a much better launching pad for future Episodes and Anthology offerings than they thought May would be? What if they realize they have much more open road in front of them near the holidays than they do during the blockbuster minefield of the summer? And what if that sets up a showdown between STAR WARS: EPISODE VIII and AVATAR 2 at movie theaters for IMAX presence, for screens, etc.?

Who you got in that head-to-head matchup of billion-dollar enterprises?