MTV caught up with the filmmaker, who revealed that the fourth installment would be a prequel.
“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,” he said, adding, “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.”
Regarding the next two films, he is still working on the story. “I’m writing two scripts together as one big thing.” Twentieth Century Fox was targeting a December 2014 release date for Avatar 2 and a December 2015 release for Avatar 3.
You can check out the interview segment below: