When it was revealed recently that 20th Century Fox had dated Assassin’s Creed and The Greatest Show on Earth for December 2016, many wondered what that meant for the first of James Cameron’s Avatar sequels.
After all, the 2009 movie was a box office juggernaut, becoming the highest grossing movie of all-time, so why pit two of their other releases against it? Well, the director has now confirmed that Avatar 2 is being pushed back to a rather vague “late 2017”. It appears as if the delay is a result of ongoing script work. ys:
“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,” Cameron revealed in a recent interview with the Associated Press. “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 plan apparently is for each of the movies to link up, but in a way which means that they can stand on their own as being satisfying movies in their own right too. Does anyone really care about another Avatar movie all these years later however? This is a long gap between the first and second instalments, and with Marvel and DC Comics movies dominating cinemas, the desire to return to this world may have faded.
As each December will see the release of a new Star Wars movie, Avatar is going to have some serious competition from 2017 and beyond. We’ll just have to wait and see what Cameron comes up with!
