James Cameron’s ‘Avatar 2’ Gets 2017 Release Date, More Sequels in Works

After a long wait, Oscar-winning director James Cameron has finally announced the first tentative date for Avatar 2, and it seems the film will be released in the 2017 holiday season - the same as the scheduled date for Disney's still untitled Star Wars: Episode VIII.

According to Collider, the Titanic director has finally spoken about the ongoing pre-production of the film's two sequels, after a number of delays: with three more planned movies underway, Cameron had originally said that the second part's release would be on December 2016, but that's obviously not happening anymore.

It's been six years since the original film hit theaters back in 2009, turning into one of the highest-grossing movies of all time.  Since then, Cameron has delayed production repeatedly, now he's finally given audiences what seems like a feasible date, December 2017.

The 61 year-old director, who has given the world some of film's biggest box office hits in the past three decades, recently spoke to the Montreal Gazette about how production is proceeding going for the second installment of the four-part saga.

"Christmas of [20]17 is the target," Cameron told the Canadian publication. "But I don't consider that to be as important as the fact that when we get all three films done, we drop them a year apart. I call it a meta-narrative that runs across the three movies."

In all, fans of the saga set on Pandora should be able to see the next three installments around the holidays in 2017, 2018 and finally on 2019, in a move similar to the way Peter Jackson handled the Lord of the Rings trilogy from 2001 to 2003.

Even though Avatar broke every box office record at the time of its release, the film remains a heavily divisive one; while the general consensus is that it's a visually breathtaking film, many movie fanatics claim the story is too simplistic and the dialogues are poor, a line of criticism that Cameron has received numerous times in the past.