Perhaps you won’t believe it until you see them, but those Avatar sequels are finally happening. No, really. It’s real this time. Really real. So real that filming has reportedly started in California’s Manhattan Beach. Deadline notes that not only did production officially begin on Monday, but Avatar director/world’s most ambitious man James Cameron is shooting all four planned sequels in succession, just like Peter Jackson did with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But how much will that cost, you ask? A cool, collective sum of $1 billion—a figure that is clearly Cameron’s favorite number.

It’s an unprecedented price for a quartet of movies, Deadline notes, already dubbing this the “most expensive shoot of its kind.” That sum was tallied thanks to both the amount of work Cameron is trying to do—filming four big-budget fantasy movies in sequence is no joke—and the director’s fondness for state-of-the-art technology. Cameron made a big show of the first Avatar’s 3-D properties, which pushed audiences to see the original film in that still-novel and more expensive format. Though it cost $237 million to make, the movie went on to gross $2.7 billion worldwide, eclipsing the all-time box-office record previously set by Titanic . . . Cameron’s other big-budget achievement. So, if there’s any director well within their rights to rack up a $1 billion spending fee, it’s probably him. There’s also a good measure of hype around the fact that Cameron is working on new virtual and motion-capture technology for the wondrous blue world of Pandora, which won’t come cheap either.

Despite the recent production start, the next four films are still a world away. In April, the filmmaker finally revealed their supposedly locked release dates: Dec.18, 2020, Dec. 17, 2021, Dec. 20, 2024, and December 19, 2025.

Until then, fans can visit the Disney World tie-in park, Pandora, which opened back in May. Sure, its debut may seem like extremely random timing—the first Avatar came out in 2009, and the next one isn’t scheduled for another three years—but it does serve the dual purpose of slowly building up hype for the upcoming sequel and luring fans back into a world they may have lost interest in years ago.