With previous reports of three more sequels for the 2009 blockbuster sci-fi film, acclaimed director James Cameron has confirmed an Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 release date, as well as a for Avatar 4 (which will reportedly be a prequel).
Avatar 2 is projected to hit theaters Christmas of 2016, Avatar 3 the year after that, and the fourth film will be in 2018.
"James Cameron is still working on the final drafts of the script and then everyone in the cast will get the call," actress Zoe Saldana told Daily Mirror about the Avatar 3 release date, while promoting Marvel's 'Guardians Of The Galaxy.' "We're going to be shooting mainly in Los Angeles and that will make things easier for me since I live there. Because we're doing the sequels back-to-back and it's going to take at least eight or nine months or more to finish the [three] films."
Cameron enlisted some screenwriters' help to complete the screenplay for the three movies. John Friedman is helping the director for the second film. Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver will be working with Shane Salerno for sequel number three and four.
"In writing the new films, I’ve come to realize that Avatar’s world, story and characters have become even richer than I anticipated,” the award-winning director spoke of his plans for the installments. “It became apparent that two films would not be enough to capture everything I wanted to put on screen."
He previously told the New York Times that he had already mapped out the fictional world's sequels but admitted that he needed the help of a bunch of screenplay writers to work on a 'parallel process' for the three films.
"We set ourselves a challenge of writing three films at the same time,” he told the Los Angeles Times Hero Complex Film Festival in past news. “And I could certainly write any one of them but to write three in some reasonable amount of time - we wanted to shoot them together so we couldn't start one until all three scripts were done and approved.”
The director wrote1,500 pages of notes about Avatar's background information. He still has to work with his group of writers to make sense of all the details to stay on schedule for the Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 release dates, as well as Avatar 4's.
