James Cameron just dropped some not-so-happy news. The highly anticipated sequel for "Avatar" has been pushed back an entire year. The film, dubbed "Avatar 2," was supposed to be released December 2016 but the director told The Associated Press he was pushing it back to 2017.
According to Variety, it's been rumored for months that Cameron had not given 20th Century Fox a script for the sequel, which in turn delayed production and budgeting. He confirmed that was the reasoning behind the delay telling the AP that he plans to have all three scripts - for a second, third and fourth sequel - finished by the end of January.
"We're writing three simultaneously. And we've done that so that everything tracks throughout the three films," he explained, via the Huffington Post.
"We're not just going to do one and then make up another one and another one after that," Cameron said. "And parallel with that, we're doing all the design. So we've designed all the creatures and the environments."
Cameron will film the movies one at a time, back-to-back, and then release them over three consecutive years.
"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," he told the AP.
The first "Avatar" movie was released in 2009 starring Zoe Saldana, Sam Worthington and Stephen Lang. It became the highest-grossing movie in history, raking in about $2.8 billion at the box office. It also won Academy Awards for cinematography, visual effects and art direction, as well as, a Golden Globe for best drama.
"Avatar" will be filmed in New Zealand and Cameron plans to shoot the sequels there as well.
