James Cameron has been preparing to make sequels to Avatar for so long that we're honestly not sure if those movies will ever come out. However, a new word from one of the film's stars seems confident that the movies will arrive. At a recent film screening, Sigourney Weaver revealed that not only are the Avatar sequels actually going to be filmed, they're all scheduled to start later this year.
We're starting! We're starting training, and we're starting --- hm, I probably can't say anything. We will be actually shooting it by the fall.
The last thing that we heard about Avatar 2 was that it wasn't going to make its expected Christmas 2018 release date. While most movies that would be shooting this fall would likely be able to make a December 2018 date, the fact that Avatar is looking to make four more movies, and that the post-production work will be more extensive than your average special effects blockbuster, likely still puts that date out of reach. So maybe a Christmas 2019 release is what we should be looking for now.
Of course, it has to be said, this isn't the first time that we've been told that filming on Avatar 2 was ready to start, and it hasn't happened any of the previous times. Although, Sigourney Weaver's comments to The Hollywood Reporter certainly seem genuine. Every indication is that James Cameron's pre-production design and all the scripts he's written are ready to go, so perhaps this time things are actually ready to start cameras rolling, but we've been fooled before.
We honestly don't know what we'd do with ourselves if Avatar sequels started filming. It's been nearly a decade since the first movie broke box office records and we've been promised sequels ever since. How do we even go on in a world where Avatar sequels are actually happening?
What was originally a trilogy of new films has now expanded to five additional films. The impression has been was that they would be filmed all together with plans to release one every December until they're all released. That's a fairly difficult balancing act when doing it with a pair of films. If James Cameron really tries to do it with five movies then we could still be looking at several more years before the next movie actually debuts.
We're certainly curious. We're interested to know what a movie with a decade of pre-production looks like, and so if we believe Sigourney Weaver, and we will because she's Sigourney Weaver, then we may get our chance to see. At the same time, we'll be keeping a close eye on this one because we won't truly believe that Avatar movies are actually on the way until filming has begun.
