James Cameron offers 'Avatar' sequel update

James Cameron's Avatar is the most commercially successful film of all time at the worldwide box office, as the film grossed nearly $2.8 billion in theaters around the globe. After a few years without news on sequels, fans learned that Cameron would produce three of them.

The current plan is to shoot the films back-to-back-to-back starting this fall and then release them in Dec. 2016, Dec. 2017 and Dec. 2018. Cameron has been updating fans periodically on the status of the sequels, and he did so again in an interview with RTL (via Market Saw):

"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."

As for the story, Cameron promised that the world of Avatar has no shortage of directions for him to go with the plot:

"That's the great thing about Avatar. It's such a rich world, I can explore any theme or any idea that I want. Once you've got the characters that an audience loves, it's great to surprise them and make changes and turns that they don't expect. And you don't have to spend so much of the movie setting up all that stuff because the audience will remember from the previous film."

What do you think? Do you expect the Avatar sequels to live up to the original? Let us know in the comments below.