Jon Landau, a longtime collaborator with James Cameron, recently spoke about the progress of Avatar 2 and Avatar 3, but now we have an idea of what the fourth film will be. From Cameron himself comes word that Avatar 4 will most likely be a prequel that explores the colonization process of Pandora before the events that happened in Avatar.
While the creative team is still working on the scripts for the two sequels, Cameron admits he has not yet written the prequel, but seems to have the heart of an idea in mind.
In a recent interview with MTV, Cameron revealed that Avatar 4 would have to be a prequel:
“Because when we drop in, even in the first film in Avatar 1, as it will be known in the future, we’re dropping into a process that’s 35 years in to a whole colonization. That will complete an arc and if that leads into more, we’ll start, not imitating Star Wars, but it’s a logical thing to do because we’ll have completed the thematic arc by the end of three. The only thing left to do is go back to see what it was like on those first expeditions and create some new characters that then become legacy characters in later films. It’s a plan.”
Cameron further elaborated on what exactly the prequel would center on:
“I have an idea for a fourth. I haven’t really put pen to paper on it, but basically it goes back to the early expeditions of Pandora, and kind of what went wrong with the humans and the Na’vi and what that was like to be an explorer and living in that world.”
He also comments on the progress of the sequels:
“We’ve spent two years refining the whole pipeline. It was a hideously complex process to make that film and a lot has been said about that, but we don’t want it to be done in the same prototypical way as the first one, we want it to be a much smoother workflow just for creativity reasons.”
And speaking of creativity, Cameron jokingly compares his writing process to that of Peter Jackson, saying:
“You know, Peter Jackson had it easy, he already had the books. He had the books. Now if I had a time machine I could go forward and watch the movies and then come back, but I don’t!”
You can also hear what Cameron said in the video interview below:
