SPOILERS: James Cameron Reveals 'Avatar 4' Details

by UInterviewSeptember 10, 2012, 12:00 amNews >

Acclaimed director James Cameron, 58, still has plenty of work to do on the Avatar trilogy — he is currently creating two sequels to the wildly successful original Avatar — and now he's already discussing a fourth Avatar film, which he envisions as a prequel to the original.

“I haven't really put pen to paper on it, but basically it goes back to the early expeditions of Pandora, and kind of what went wrong with the humans and the Na'vi and what that was like to be an explorer and living in that world," Cameron told MTV.

Cameron revealed that there would most certainly be available story lines to address in a film leading up to the original, as the colonization of Pandora has been going on for 35 years by the time we meet Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) in Avatar. Still, the idea of fourth film is a long way off, according to producer Jon Landau.

“We're doing two back-to-back, but not a third,” Landau told the Courier Post, when asked about the Avatar sequel production status. Cameron says the first sequel to Avatar will not be released until at least 2015.

For now, Cameron is focusing on the second and third Avatar films, which are being shot back-to-back and will once again star Worthington and Zaldana. Cameron has been working on the two scripts for the sequels, and the movies are also undergoing unspecified production improvements in order to make filming the next two sequels much easier than the original, which was particularly difficult. News of any sequels should bode well for 20th Century Fox, who is producing the rest of the trilogy. Their investment in Cameron paid off with the original Avatar, which went on to become the highest grossing film of all time, pulling in over $2.7 billion at the box office.

While we’re a few years away from returning to Pandora for a new adventure, fans will soon be able to relive the original Avatar in 3-D in the comfort of their own homes, when it will be released on Blu-ray 3-D on October 16. —Hal Sundt