Surprise! James Cameron's AVATAR 2 Won't Make Its 2018 Release Date
It was previously announced that James Cameron's long-awaited Avatar sequel would be released in December 2018, but according to a recent interview with the filmmaker, that's not going to happen. The film has been delayed, yet again. I guess it's not a big surprise. When talking to The Star, Cameron explains why the film is being delayed yet again:
“Well, 2018 is not happening. We haven’t announced a firm release date. 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. (Laughs) 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 original plan was to release Avatar 2 in December 2018 and that would be followed by the release of the other sequels, which would arrive in December 2020, December 2022, and December 2023. I imagine those release dates will end up changing as well and will all be rescheduled when a solid release date for Avatar 2 is announced.
I wonder what Fox thinks about all this. It will at least be 10 freakin' years since the first Avatar movie was released. It'll be interesting to see if that audience still cares after all these years. I guess it all depends on how the movie looks when we start actually seeing footage from it.
Yesterday we shared a couple of videos taking us on a tour of Disney World's upcoming new attraction, Pandora: The World of Avatar. It's in these videos that we learned that the attraction is actually part of the film saga that Cameron set out to make. It is set after the sequel and Cameron explained:
“So it’s Avatar the first movie, then there are the four sequels that we’re working on now and then a whole generation after that, when all the conflict, all the struggle and all the warfare between the Na’vi and the humans is over; and the Na’vi have welcomed us to Pandora to help us understand nature and ourselves better.”
Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang and Sigourney Weaver are all set to return to the Avatar sequels and I'm excited to see what Cameron has planned. I'm sure that he'll once again blow us away with his filmmaking wizardry.