James Cameron: AVATAR 4 Will Be A Prequel - Jon Landau: BATTLE ANGEL Still Coming!

Some HUGE news out of the Lightstorm Entertainment camp today from it's two biggest players: Director James Cameron and producer Jon Landau.

First let's hear from Cameron as he lets us know that AVATAR 4 will actually be a prequel rather than following on the tails of AVATAR 3!

Here's Cameron's rationale: "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 into 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 (AVATAR 3). 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."

"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."

"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 an obvious elbow to the ribs of Peter Jackson with this quote:
"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!"

Simply love that there is a plan coming together at long last for these movies and it definitely seems to hold water why he is doing it.

Now here's what Jon Landau had to say about BATTLE ANGEL:

"I am sure you will get to see BATTLE ANGEL. It is one of my favorite stories, a great story about a young woman’s journey to self-discovery. It is a film that begs the question: 'What does it mean to be human? Are you human if you have a heart, a brain or a soul?'  I look forward to giving the audience the film.

Who we want to put in the lead role today and who we want to put in the lead role when the time comes, it can be two totally different people who would be right for the role. Now we focus on AVATAR for the next four or five years. It will hopefully be right after that."

YES!!! I am unbelievably happy that BATTLE ANGEL is moving forward after AVATAR 2, 3 and 4. For all of our BATTLE ANGEL coverage, click here. I believe it's time to start ramping up my embedded sources for these upcoming AVATAR movies - stay tuned!

Source: MovieZone via Collider