There is no rest for the weary even when it comes to wildly successful Hollywood filmmakers, as not only is director James Cameron looking a half-decade into the future with his sequels to Avatar, but the man is looking beyond that even, planning to still adapt magna series Battle Angel.
James Cameron and producer Jon Landau have all but confirmed over the last little while that Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 would film back-to-back and that Fox is planning release dates for December of 2014 and 2015, respectively.
In addition to a duo of sequels to 2009’s Avatar, there had been rumblings of a fourth entry in the soon-to-be franchise too and in an interview with MTV, Cameron has revealed that not only does he have an idea, but it would be imagined as a prequel.
Here’s what he had to say:
“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. 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.”
With Cameron’s ambitious sequel plan already in the early stages, that means his long-planned adaptation of Yukito Kishiro’s magna series Battle Angel will be taking a back seat once again. However, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t still plan to bring the series to the big screen.
In another interview, this time with MovieZine, Landau chimed in on the planned film:
“We’ll focus on ‘Avatar’ for the next four or five years. Hopefully right after that… I am confident you will see it. It’s one of my favorite stories, I think it is an incredible story, a journey of self-discovery of a young woman. It is a movie that begs the question: ‘What does it mean to be human? Are you human if you have a heart, are you human if you have a mind, are you human if you have a soul?’ And I look forward to bringing that film to audiences.”
Battle Angel is set the 26th century in a in a cyborg-dominated society 300 years after mankind fell in a global war. The story follows a young girl in a cyborg body who, after being found in wreckage and repaired, realizes that she has lost her memory and doesn’t even know who she really is.
The property has always sounded very intriguing so it’s good news to hear that Cameron still has interest in the project, even if we’ll have to wait quite some time to see it adapted. As for the expanded Avatar universe, this is all looking like an immensely entertaining series of projects that is certainly unparalleled in planning and scope.
As always, we’ll be sure to keep you updated on any anything and everything James Cameron-related.
