Avatar news is something of a rarity these days. With the new Star Wars movies knocking at our doorstep and the ending of Peter Jackson’s saga of Middle-Earth, the blue aliens have all but been forgotten. But when news about Avatar comes, it comes in waves. Director James Cameron reassured us in an interview with Empire that the plotlines for the sequels will be “b***hin” and going so far as to saying that “You will s**t yourself with your mouth wide open.” Big words but even bigger movies. James Cameron does promise us a lot, though his cinematographic past backs things up.
The first Avatar film which premiered in 2009 was one of the highest grossing movies in the history of cinema, having made over 2 billion dollars wordlwide. Praised for its ground breaking CGI, the movie won three Academy Awards, one for Best Art Direction, another for Best Cinematography and of course, Special Effects. Now James Cameron wants to up the ante with the sequels. The director has chosen separate writers for each movie. For Avatar 2 Rick Jaffa(Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) and Amanda Silvers will be handling the script, for Avatar 3 Josh Friedman(War of the Worlds) will be responsible and for Avatar 4 we have Shane Salerno(Armaggedon).James Cameron’s peculiar strategy regarding his distribution may prove efficient in the long run :”I think we met for seven months and we whiteboarded out every scene in every film together and I didn’t assing each writer which film they were going to work on until the last day. I knew if I assigned them their scripts ahead of time, they’d tune out every time we were talking about the other movie”.
James Cameron will also opt to shoot his sequels in 48 frames per second, something that only Peter Jackson has done with his Hobbit trilogy. Such a feat may prove troublesome however as several people who went to Peter Jackson’s movie and saw it in 48 frames reported nausea and headaches. It remains to be seen how this will play out. Avatar 2 is scheduled to premiere in 2016 with the other two sequels premiering a year apart, in 2017 and 2018 respectively.