Avatar Prequel Is Part Of The Plan, Says James Cameron

Last week producer Jon Landau told Avatar fans that James Cameron would be filming two sequels back-to-back but he would not be working on a rumored fourth sequel. Well, it looks like that was only partially true. There may be a fourth Avatar movie. It’s just going to be a prequel instead.

Cameron recently revealed that he plans to go back to the early exploration days of Pandora for the fourth Avatar movie. The acclaimed director acknowledged the fact that the fourth movie was still in the planning stages but did say that he was working on it.

Cameron said:

“I have an idea for a fourth… It goes back to the early expeditions of Pandora and kind of what went wrong with the humans… 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 said that he’ll complete the story arc by the end of the third movie. So when he gets around to making the fourth, the only logical thing to do is to go Star Wars on Avatar and detail the origins of the story.

Cameron said:

“Because when we drop in, even in the first film in ‘Avatar 1,’ as it will be known in the future, we’re dropping into a process that’s 35 years in to a whole colonization… That will complete an arc and if that leads into more, we’ll start, not imitating ‘Star Wars,’ but it’s a logical thing to do because we’ll have completed the thematic arc by the end of three. The only thing left to do is go back to see what it was like on those first expeditions and create some new characters that then become legacy characters in later films. It’s a plan.”

What Landau said earlier this week was true but a little misleading. Cameron will be working on two Avatar sequels back-to-back. Once those are finished, he’ll probably start working on the prequel.