There's been a lot of news on James Cameron's Avatar sequels recently. Cameron recently revealed that he planned on developing a fourth film that would be a prequel. Then his producer Jon Landau said parts 2 and 3 would shoot back-to-back but the fourth film would have to wait until after those two films have been completed. Now in a recent interview Comingsoon, Cameron talked a little bit more about the next two sequels, and how it relates to oceanographic exploration and environmentalism.
We're doing 'Avatar' films now, so we're making up an ocean ecosystem for Pandora, That's gonna have less to do with the deep exploration that I've done than it has to do with my concerns about conservation of Earth's oceans. The fact that we're basically overfishing, climate change... a few degrees of temperature rise are gonna basically take out the coral reefs. All those beautiful images of the coral environments we all grew up with won't exist in 50 years at the rate we're going in terms of pumping greenhouse gases into the environment. These are the things that concern me.
There isn't a direct map between the deep ocean exploration that I've done and the ocean stuff that we're doing in the 'Avatar' films. However, I'm going to continue in the future making documentaries and continuing explorations stuff as well because I'm always fascinated by that. We don't have to explore the coral reefs at this point because we understand them very well. We also understand that they're dying and they're ultimately doomed if we don't change our profligate ways.
I hope that explains it, 'cause people have connected the dots directly together. 'Oh, going to the challenger deep has a direct connection to what we're going to see in Avatar 2,' and that's not the case at all. It's all the scuba diving I did before I even started the deep ocean stuff that has more of a direct connection to Avatar 2 & 3, which by the way won't take place completely in or under the water. That's just part of the environment of Pandora that we're going to see.
I'm really curious to see how these sequels turn out, and if they end up being as successful or even more successful than the first film. One thing we know for sure is that they'll be entertaining. The level of entertainment has yet to be seen.
Twentieth Century Fox wants to release the Avatar 2 in December 2014 and Avatar 3 on December 2015. Not sure if it's sounding like that's going to actually happen though. It's seems like like there's still a lot of work to be done.