There's An Avatar Multiplayer Game In The Works, Get The Details

For those of you who wish to spend more time in the world of Avatar, you're in luck, as a new mobile game based on the movie franchise is set to launch in the coming years.

For clarification's sake, we're talking about Avatar, the James Cameron movie starring eight-foot-tall Smurf hippies, not the animated series by the same name featuring a bunch of youngsters who can control the forces of nature.

In case you're wondering why anyone would want to make a mobile game based on a film from 2009, you probably haven't been keeping up on your movie news. The original Avatar brought in more than $2.8 billion in worldwide box office sales and, according to Variety, it still holds the record for biggest silver screen release in the history of ever. Cameron always said he planned to make a sequel and it looks like he's making good on that promise in a big, big way.

Rather than plan for a single follow-up to Avatar, the director has a quadrology planned for the coming years. We can expect Avatar 2, or whatever they decide to call it, to drop in 2018, followed by another Avatar film in 2020, 2022 and 2023. We're guessing that the timing on those final two films will have the movies releasing like every other series does these days, with a couple of films that work fine as standalone outings and a final chapter that was so big it had to be broken in two.

In other words, it makes a heck of a lot of sense to plan for an Avatar game, as well as pretty much anything else they can slap the franchise's name on.

The upcoming mobile game is coming to us courtesy of a deal struck between Lightstorm Entertainment, 20th Century Fox and Kabam. Kabam isn't new to this whole "turn a movie into a mobile game" business, as the team has made similar games for properties like Fast & Furious, Avengers: Age of Ultron, The Hobbit and The Hunger Games.

All we know about launch plans so far is that the Avatar game will arrive before the new film, presumably focusing on events from the original movie. The game will continue to update, with larger content drops planned around the launch of each of the new Avatar sequels.

According to Avatar producer Jon Landau, the world of Pandora is simply too vast to explore completely across five movies, which is why he thinks players will be drawn to the mobile game that will focus on characters, locations and lore that won't be fully explored in the movies.

As for the game's genre, Avatar is planned as a massively multiplayer mobile strategy game, which has me thinking it'll be similar to games like Clash of Clans, where players build up their own bases, gather resources and fend off intruders. That's just a guess, though, so don't quote me.