PLUS: No one really dies in science-fiction, not even Sigourney Weaver



There won’t be 12-year waits between film projects this time for director James Cameron.

The man who can lay claim to the highest-grossing movie and second highest-grossing movie of all time (not counting inflation) says he’s hard at work on more from the universe of Oscar nominee “Avatar,” and that the next two movies could be shot together.

It would be similar to the strategy used most recently with “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” as well as what’s proposed for “The Hobbit.” But filming two sequel movies at the same time didn’t start there. Heck, even Robert Zemeckis did it for the second and third parts in his Back to the Future trilogy in the early 1990s.

“Our plan right now is to do [parts] two and three as a single large production and release them a year apart,” Cameron told reporters, according to ComingSoon. “In order to do that, we have to refine our technical processes beyond the end of where we were finishing ‘Avatar’ [part] one a year ago. We need to future-proof ourselves out five or six years to the end of the third film.”

But he might not get to the sequels to “Avatar” right away. There has been talk he could begin work on his Cleopatra project, potentially starring Angelina Jolie. If he were to take on the “Avatar” sequels first, he would work on them exclusively, however, until both were done.

“I’m not going to work on a film between [parts] two and three,” Cameron said of the Avatar franchise.

Although there isn’t much out there floating around on what the sequels could be about, except for the fact they would take place on Pandora after the events of the 2009 movie, Cameron is leaving the door open for Sigourney Weaver to step back in.

“Who said she died,” Cameron said of Weaver’s character of Dr. Grace Augustine. “Nobody dies in a science-fiction movie. Whether Grace lives or dies depends more on Sigourney’s agent than anything.”

The special Blu-ray edition of “Avatar” is set for release Nov. 16.