According to The Hollywood Reporter, director James Cameron announced today that the first of his follow ups to the hit film AVATAR will now be delayed until 2017, due to the complexity of the writing task. The Oscar winning director previously announced that he would make three new installments of the film over three consecutive years.
"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 in Wellington, New Zealand, where he is currently promoting the local film industry.
He continued, "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. And parallel with that, we're doing all the design. So we've designed all the creatures and the environments."
The 2009 science fiction action film was written and directed by James Cameron and starred Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, Joel David Moore, Giovanni Ribisi and Sigourney Weaver.
The film was set in the mid-22nd century, when humans are mining a precious mineral called unobtanium on Pandora, a lush habitable moon of a gas giant in the Alpha Centauri star system. The expansion of the mining colony threatens the continued existence of a local tribe of Na'vi - a humanoidspecies indigenous to Pandora. The film's title refers to a genetically engineered Na'vi body with the mind of a remotely located human, and is used to interact with the natives of Pandora.
The sequels were originally scheduled for release in December 2016, December 2017, and December 2018.
