He’s never making these, is he?
James Cameron has once again pushed back the expected release date for the first of his planned quartet of sequels to his 2009 blockbuster Avatar.
Speaking to the Toronto Sun, Cameron admitted that the most recently expected release date for the first film, December 2018, is now off the table.
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.
Cameron cited the project’s massive scope – filming all four sequels at once – as the continuing delay.
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.
He has been talking a pretty big game for several years now about his plans, and he has always seemed to be just about ready to roll cameras on the project. If he had started when he originally planned, with just a trilogy of sequels, we would have seen them finished by now. Has Cameron bit off more than he can chew? When you have two of the top grossing films of all time, it might be hard to hear the word “No.” But I am wonderng about the money that is being funneled into this project over the years. Is it something that studio 20th Century Fox can ever recoup?
