You won’t see a sequel to James Cameron’s Avatar in movie theaters for the next few years, according to the director, but that doesn’t mean that you’ll be starved of new product set in Pandora. Speaking at a press event to promote next month’s 3-disc Blu-Ray release of a new special edition of the movie, Cameron talked about plans to make Avatar into the next Star Wars.
Although the next two Avatar movies – which’ll be shot back-to-back and released a year apart, if all goes to plan – are years away (Cameron said that he wants to make them right now, but he has to wait until the technology is in place for what he wants to do; he talked about needing to “future proof” the movies so that they’ll not seem outdated five or six years from now), Cameron hasn’t abandoned Pandora. He’s currently working on the Avatar novel, which he described as “a big project” that won’t just adapt the movie, but expand it in scope considerably, going back three decades before the opening of the movie and also containing unseen and unhinted-at plots and characters from the same period as happened at the same time as what was seen on screen. “What I want to do is say, if this movie was based on a book, what would that book be?” he explained. And it’ll be more than just fiction – He revealed that he also sees this novel as “a bible” that will be used as a guide for other writers to create their own Avatar stories in “spin-off novels, graphic novels and comic books.” Sound ambitious? That’s because James Cameron is ambitious when it comes to Avatar; when he talked about the movie’s competition, he said “We’re competing with Star Warsm who have a 30 year head-start, but we have to compete with the Tolkien universe, the Star Trek universe [and] the Star Wars universe.”
And just in case you’re worried that the new Avatar box-set will be the last you’ll see of the movie version of Pandora, don’t be; if everything works out, next year will see the release of a 3D Blu-Ray version of the movie.
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