James Cameron Announces Avatar Sequels Delayed Yet Again, Perhaps It Should Be Permanent?

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say that no one is really asking for these Avatar sequels, but director James Cameron is still hellbent on making four more of them. The first film, often described as “FernGully in space,” was released on December 18, 2009 and beat out Titanic as the highest grossing film in America. In 2011, Cameron said he was working on a sequel expected to arrive in 2014 but, alas, that never occurred. That Avatar themed attraction at Walt Disney World’s Animal Kingdom park, which opens on May 27, may have had something to do with it.

Even so, a new release date for December 28, 2018 had been announced but that too, will be a deadline unmet. “Well, 2018 is not happening. We haven’t announced a firm release date,” Camera explained, per Newsarama.

He continued, “What people have to understand is that this is a cadence of releases. So we’re not making Avatar 2. We’re making Avatar 2, 3, 4 and 5. It’s an epic undertaking. It’s not unlike building the Three Gorges dam. So I know where I’m going to be for the next eight years of my life. It’s not an unreasonable time frame if you think about it. It took us four-and-a-half years to make one movie and now we’re making four. We’re full tilt boogie right now. This is my day job and pretty soon we’ll be 24-7. We’re pretty well designed on all our creatures and sets. It’s pretty exciting stuff. I wish I could share with the world. But we have to preserve a certain amount of showmanship and we’re going to draw that curtain when the time is right.”

The real takeaway here is not to believe any release dates until you see the actual posters. And as much as I like to rag on the film (I still can’t tell you any of the character names or what the film was about other than greedy humans destroying beautiful land over a mineral called unobtanium), it was unbelievably gorgeous. It was very much a Cameron film in that it was colorful, pretty, technologically advanced and grand in scale.

With that said, I’m not too invested in these films so this delay doesn’t break my heart. What about you? Not happy about the push back? Don’t care?

(via Newsarama, image via screencap)

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