Director James Cameron says he plans to make three sequels to his 2009 sci-fi blockbuster movie Avatar in New Zealand.20TH CENTURY FOX/The Associated Press
Film director James Cameron says that writing three Avatar sequels is such a complex job, he is delaying the first new film a year and it will now be released in late 2017.
Cameron plans to film the highly anticipated sequels at one time and then release the three films over consecutive years.
The first had been due in 2016, but he said the writing process had proved to be "very involved" and that the initial target date was probably too ambitious.
"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 this week while on a visit to New Zealand for a film industry event.
Cameron said the goal was to have the scripts for the three movies completed by the end of this month. He is leading a team that is writing the screenplays.
"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," the director said. "And parallel with that, we're doing all the design. So we've designed all the creatures and the environments."
Cameron said he thought it was important that each film linked forward to the next one in a satisfying way but also came to a resolution so that the audience wasn't left hanging.
Released in 2009, Avatar became the highest-grossing film in history, with a box office take of nearly $2.8-billion (U.S.).
Cameron filmed the original movie in New Zealand and is planning to shoot the sequels there.