Cameron has been
developing his Avatar sequels for several years now, and back in
January he announced that he’d pushed back the release of Avatar
2 from 2016 to December 25th 2017. Whether it keeps that date
remains to be seen.
James
Cameron has spent the past few years hammering away at development on the
upcoming trio of sequels to his 2009 mega-blockbuster Avatar, and
with the films gearing up to go into back-to-back production the director has
provided a brief update during a chat with Empire.
Cameron
has been working on the screenplays for Avatar 2, Avatar 3 and Avatar
4 with several writers, including Josh Friedman (Terminator:
The Sarah Connor Chronicles), Shane Salerno (Savages),
and Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (Rise of the
Planet of the Apes), and he went on to discuss the writing process:
“I
think we met for seven months and we whiteboarded out every scene in every film
together,” Cameron explains, “and I didn’t assign each writer which film they
were going to work on until the last day. I knew if I assigned them their
scripts ahead of time, they’d tune out every time we were talking about the
other movie.”
Finally,
he revealed that he’s opted against shooting in 60 frames per second, instead
choosing 48fps: “My thinking at the time was that 60 [FPS] might be a better
segue to the video market. I’ll be plugging into a system that’s a little more
mature, so it makes sense for me to do 48 frames at this point.”
And
finally, he also took a moment to big the sequels up, stating that: “I can tell
you one thing about them. They’re gonna be bitchin’. You will shit yourself
with your mouth wide open.”
Avatar 2 is set to hit in December 2016
followed by Avatar 3 in
December 2017 and Avatar 4 in
December 2018 with Sam Worthington (Jake Sully), Zoe Saldana (Neytiri) and
Stephen Lang (Colonel Quaritch) all confirmed to return.
