For nearly three years now, Avatar 2 has been in the works with no production development made at all. However, we know that director James Cameron is hard at work in making both the sequel and Avatar 3, on top of his deep sea explorations, and we’ll be travelling back to Pandora soon enough. Now, Cameron himself has spoken out about what’s to come from his career, and interestingly enough he’s only focused on the blue creatures from here on out.

In an interview with The New York Times, Cameron said he was done developing other films that aren’t Avatar, with the exception of documentaries:

I’ve divided my time over the last 16 years over deep ocean exploration and filmmaking. I’ve made two movies in 16 years, and I’ve done eight expeditions. Last year I basically completely disbanded my production company’s development arm. So I’m not interested in developing anything. I’m in the “Avatar” business. Period. That’s it. I’m making “Avatar 2,” “Avatar 3,” maybe “Avatar 4,” and I’m not going to produce other people’s movies for them. I’m not interested in taking scripts. 

And that all sounds I suppose a little bit restricted, but the point is I think within the “Avatar” landscape I can say everything I need to say that I think needs to be said, in terms of the state of the world and what I think we need to be doing about it. And doing it in an entertaining way. And anything I can’t say in that area, I want to say through documentaries, which I’m continuing. I’ve done five documentaries in the last 10 years, and I’ll hopefully do a lot more. In fact, I’m doing one right now, which is on this, the Deep Sea Challenge project that we just completed the first expedition. So that’ll be a film that’ll get made this year and come out first quarter of next year.

This seemingly puts an end to the talks on whether or not Cameron will adapt Battle Angel, which a good few were looking forward to. But, the director does have a point. The first Avatar was very much brimming with messages about the environment, control, and everything in between, and he could still provide that same structure to other Avatar films.

When finally asked about how the Avatar sequels are coming along, unforuntately Cameron says that we still have quite some time before we’ll see the next film in theaters:

We’ve spent the last year and a half on software development and pipeline development. The virtual production methodology was extremely prototypical on the first film. As then, no one had ever done it before and we didn’t even know for two and half years into it and $100 million into it if it was going to work. So we just wanted to make our lives a whole lot easier so that we can spend a little more of our brainpower on creativity. It was a very, very uphill battle on the first film. So we’ve been mostly working on the tool set, the production pipeline, setting up the new stages in Los Angeles, setting up the new visual effects pipeline in New Zealand, that sort of thing. And, by the way, writing. We haven’t gotten to the design stage yet. That’ll be the next.

The technology surrounding Avatar is certainly what made the first film so incredibly dazzling, and it’s a very complicated process that Cameron wants to make sure he has right, especially considering there will likely be back-to-back shootings for both Avatar 2 and 3. It’s great to see it worked on in an international scale, but there’s no telling at this point just how long it will take until we see another trip to Pandora. With even rewrites going on, the process may take a bit longer, but its good to know that Cameron’s prime focus is to get the sequels up and running.

What do you think of Cameron’s quotes? Excited he’s only focus on Avatar from here on out, or do you think he should venture away from the franchise?