Today in New Zealand, director James Cameron ("The Terminator") was at an event promoting the local film industry along with his friend and fellow director Peter Jackson ("The Hobbit"). During the event, Cameron revealed that his original plan to have Avatar 2 in theaters by late 2016 was too ambitious, so he decided to push its release date to late 2017. The reason? Cameron chose to be aggressive, writing all of the scripts for the three planned Avatar sequels at the same time. "We're writing three simultaneously." Cameron continued, "And we've done that so that everything tracks throughout the three films. We're not just going to do one and then make up another one and another one after that. And parallel with that, we're doing all the design. So we've designed all the creatures and the environments."



Cameron expects that he and his team of screenwriters with help from screenwriters, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Josh Friedman and Shane Salerno. will have all three scripts completed by the end of this month. "There's a layer of complexity in getting the story to work as a saga across three films that you don't get when you're making a stand-alone film," he said.



Personally, I find it fascinating that Avatar is the highest grossing film of all time (not factoring in inflation), yet interest in the follow-up appears to be tepid at best. We're talking about a film that made $2.8 billion and won three Academy Awards. How is it that nobody seems to be foaming at the mouth for a return to Pandora? Maybe that will change once filming begins. We shall see.

AVATAR takes us to a spectacular new world beyond our imagination, where a reluctant hero embarks on a journey of redemption and discovery, as he leads a heroic battle to save a civilization. The film was first conceived by Cameron 14 years ago, when the means to realize his vision did not yet exist. Now, after four years of actual production work, AVATAR delivers a fully immersive cinematic experience of a new kind, where the revolutionary technology invented to make the film, disappears into the emotion of the characters and the sweep of the story.



Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Michelle Rodriguez, Stephen Lang

Director & Writer: James Cameron