James Cameron may believe that his plans for three sequels to Avatar will be “bitchin’” and that we will, to use his even more colourful turn of phrase, “shit yourself with your mouth wide open.” But you’ll want to hold off ordering new underwear for another year, as the director is now saying he’s pushing back the release of the first film until Christmas 2017, a year later than planned.
That will naturally have a knock-on effect for the third and fourth films too, with Cameron explaining that the sheer volume of work that goes into crafting linked movies is the reason he’s hitting the brakes. "There's a layer of complexity in getting the story to work as a saga across three films that you don't get when you're making a stand-alone film," he said at an event in Wellington, New Zealand. "We're writing three simultaneously. And we've done that so that everything tracks throughout the three films. We're not just going to do one and then make up another one and another one after that," he elaborated. "And parallel with that, we're doing all the design. So we've designed all the creatures and the environments."
So while it does mean Avatar fans and 20th Century Fox, in particular, will have to wait a little longer for that return to the world of Jake, Neytiri and the rest, it appears to still be on track. Cameron has been overseeing development of the three movies, with a writing team including Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Josh Friedman and Shane Salerno cranking out the drafts. The three movies will be shot at once and released in late 2017, 2018 and 2019. At least, that’s the plan right now...