And I’m going to be focusing on the ocean on Pandora, which will be equally rich and diverse and crazy and imaginative, but it just won’t be a rain forest,” he tells the Los Angeles Times. “Part of my focus in the second film is in creating a different environment - a different setting within Pandora. (Later on, he’ll say that the Oscars don’t award his kinds of movies anymore, meaning “big, visual cinema.”)Īpril 21, 2010: The Avatar sequel, Cameron says, will dive deep (not into the history - that’s for the novel) into the ocean. March 7, 2010, an aside: Cameron loses the Oscar. But really, he’s focused on the prequel novel: “I didn’t want to do some cheesy novelization,” he says, “where some hack comes in and makes shit up.” We can bank all the capture and then go back and do cameras,” he says. “We’re talking about that, that makes a lot of sense, given the nature of these productions. Your middle-school librarian nods in agreement.Īugust 7, 2010: Now Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 will be filmed back-to-back. There are things you can do in books that you can’t do with films,” Cameron says. “It just makes sense to think of it as a two or three film arc, in terms of the business plan.”įebruary 16, 2010: We’re not only getting several more trips to Pandora, but a book! “I told myself, if it made money, I’d write a book. ““I’ve had a story line in mind from the start - there are even scenes in Avatar that I kept in because they lead to the sequel,” he tells EW. January 14, 2010: Now he says there won’t just be another - there will be several more. “Yes, there’ll be another,” he tells the crowd after a screening in Los Angeles. January 7, 2010: Days after Avatar made $1 billion, Cameron announces that we’re getting a sequel. (That’s three and a half Lord of the Rings trilogies, six Wonder Womans, 66 Hurt Lockers, and 250 Moonlights.) Here’s a timeline of all Cameron’s Avatar promises that once seemed broken, or at least teetering on the edge of breaking, but he’s definitely about to make good on them, you’ll see. But this time, he’s serious: This week, Cameron and his crew started filming the installments known as the The Avatar Sequels, which will come with a budget of $1 billion. This time, though, Cameron is really gonna make it happen - he’s not playing around! He’s spent much of the last decade teasing us about the upcoming installments, throwing out piecemeal updates (with occasional breaks for a Titanic rerelease or to shade Alien: Covenant). Filming has begun on the four sequels to Avatar, James Cameron’s 2009ģ-D CGI adventure about a paraplegic marine who lands on the planet Pandora to mine unobtainium.