Although Avatar 2 isn’t expected to be released until 2015, James Cameron has already announced plans for the fourth film in the Avatar franchise. Today he announced the news that Avatar 4 will be a prequel to 2009’s Avatar.
Cameron told MTV News:
“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…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.”
The news comes after Cameron announced earlier this year that he plans to film Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 back to back, much like how Peter Jackson filmed the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
“We’ve spent two years 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.”
In 2009 Avatar became the first film to gross over $2 billion at the box office, making it the highest grossing film of all time. The film’s home box office release would go on to break numerous sales records and become the top-selling Blu-Ray film of all time.
