James Cameron On ‘Avatar’ Sequel Production Speed

Back in 2009 James Cameron’s AVATAR shattered almost every box office record in history and went on to become the highest grossing film of all time with a whopping 2.7 Billion dollars worldwide. After the TERMINATOR director previously broke records with 1997′s TITANIC, it seems as if Cameron is unstoppable when it comes to celebrated, successful and most importantly ’event’ films.

Of course with the gargantuan success of AVATAR 20th Century Fox were never going to let a cash-cow franchise like that slip away, and so a further three instalments received the green light. Pretty quickly after second, third and fourth films were announced for Christmas 2016, 2017 and 2018, we learnt that Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana and (unexpectedly?) Stephen Lang will return. Now Cameron has given an update on the status of the upcoming sequels and what stage of pre-production he is at with them. You can read his comments below:

‘We’re still in the early stages. Right now we’re developing the software. I’m writing the scripts. We’re designing all the creatures and characters and the settings, and so on. So, I’m not actually directing yet, but I’m doing all the other creative processes that lead up to that. It’s going very well. I think it’s going to be spectacular. You’ll see new worlds, new habitats, new cultures. The primary conflict between the human view kind of dominating nature and the Na’vi view of being integrated into nature is the same, but it manifests itself in very different ways’.

‘The first film took almost four years to make. We expect to be able to accelerate the process quite a bit, because we’ve improved a lot of the software and the computer graphics tools, and we’ve been working very closely with Weta Digital down here in New Zealand developing a whole new suite of tools to speed up the process’.

‘I’m studying [high frame rate]. I haven’t made a final decision yet, whether the entire film will be made at high frame rate or parts of it. You know, we’ll be shooting at a native resolution of probably 4K and so then there should be a lot of true 4K theaters by then as well’.