Even though James Cameron recently New York Times would seem to suggest otherwise.
The filmmaker detailed how he sees his future work panning out, which includes the two anticipated Avatar sequels as well as a potential fourth film along with what he expects will be several documentaries.
Here’s what he said:
“I’ve divided my time over the last 16 years over deep ocean exploration and filmmaking. I’ve made two movies in 16 years, and I’ve done eight expeditions. Last year I basically completely disbanded my production company’s development arm. So I’m not interested in developing anything.
“I’m in the Avatar business. Period. That’s it. I’m making Avatar 2, Avatar 3, maybe Avatar 4, and I’m not going to produce other people’s movies for them. I’m not interested in taking scripts. And that all sounds I suppose a little bit restricted, but the point is I think within the Avatar landscape I can say everything I need to say that I think needs to be said, in terms of the state of the world and what I think we need to be doing about it… and doing it in an entertaining way.
“Anything I can’t say in that area, I want to say through documentaries, which I’m continuing. I’ve done five documentaries in the last 10 years, and I’ll hopefully do a lot more. In fact, I’m doing one right now, which is on this, the Deep Sea Challenge project that we just completed the first expedition. So that’ll be a film that’ll get made this year and come out first quarter of next year.”
I can respect everything he says here and I have no right to tell him otherwise. I do, however, have one hope. That hope is that he tones down what he thinks “needs to be said” in his upcoming Avatar films. I liked the first Avatar movie a lot, but I do so by overlooking the endless barrage of environmental messages he hamfisted into the production with little attempt at subtlety. Oh, and next time around, let’s come up with something better than unobtanium for the MacGuffin. That is all…
As for how those sequels are progressing, we’ve already heard producer Jon Landau say Avatar 2 was more likely to hit theaters in 2016 rather than the originally targeted 2014 release with Avatar 3 expected in 2015 and based on what Cameron is saying here that wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest:
“We’ve spent the last year and a half on software development and pipeline development. The virtual production methodology was extremely prototypical on the first film. As then, no one had ever done it before and we didn’t even know for two and half years into it and $100 million into it if it was going to work. So we just wanted to make our lives a whole lot easier so that we can spend a little more of our brainpower on creativity.
“It was a very, very uphill battle on the first film. So we’ve been mostly working on the tool set, the production pipeline, setting up the new stages in Los Angeles, setting up the new visual effects pipeline in New Zealand, that sort of thing. And, by the way, writing. We haven’t gotten to the design stage yet. That’ll be the next.”
So the script isn’t finished, they haven’t started designing anything and they are still developing the technology to achieve Cameron’s vision, which itself may not be entirely clear? Okay, we might not see this until 2020.
