James Cameron says ‘Avatar 2’ will arrive in 2016, two more afterwards
James Cameron is giving fans confirmation that Avatar will be back soon and an entire new trilogy will be filmed at the same time.
Beginning with the scripts for three films, the Terminator director says “now I’m fully dedicated to Avatar 2, 3 and 4″ reports News.com.au.
“Which are sort of, I call a mega project because we’re doing all three together,” he told AAP in Sydney.
“Where I am right now is the scripts are almost done, much of the preliminary design work has been done, so new creatures design, new settings, environments, other places you’ll see on Pandora and other places in the Avatar universe…So it’s all coming together, it’s all right on track.”
Taking a page out of Peter Jackson’s approach for the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films, Cameron is undertaking the massive challenge of filming the trilogy at one time. He says it’s not typical, but they’re making all three at once and then they will hit cinemas one after the other over a few years.
“They’ll drop a year apart, so they stay within the public consciousness as one big story,” he says as documented int the article. “Christmas 2016, Christmas 2017 and Christmas 2018 is the target.”
This confirms details Cameron said earlier: “The second, third and fourth films all go into production simultaneously. They’re essentially all in preproduction now, because we are designing creatures, settings, and characters that span all three films. And we should be finished with all three scripts within the next, I would say, six weeks.’
Writers Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa talked about working on the Avatar franchise and working with Cameron in an exclusive interview with Dispatch Radio – check it out here.
20th Century Fox has not confirmed the news, but Cameron appears to have extreme control of the Avatar franchise; therefore, Avatar 2 will arrive around Christiams 2016, Avatar 3 on Christmas 2017 and the fourth film a year later.