Back in May of this year, James Cameron stated that his filmmaking future lay solely on the world of Pandora, revealing that he was planning to direct the previously announced Avatar 2 and Avatar 3, as well as a potential fourth movie. Although producer Jon Landau subsequently played down talk of Avatar 4, Cameron has now opened up about the possibility of extending his Avatar story beyond the originally planned trilogy, discussing his idea for an eventual prequel to the 2009 mega blockbuster in an interview with 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.”
Cameron originally intended to release Avatar 2 in December 2014, but the sequel has now been delayed until at least 2015, with the Titanic director still busy penning the screenplays for the next two movies. Given the time it took Cameron to put the first Avatar together, not to mention the mammoth task of producing Avatar 2 and 3 (which he plans to film back-to-back), it would seem that we'll be in for a long, long wait before any potential prequel becomes a reality.
