James Cameron Pushes 'Avatar' Sequels Back A Year to 2017

Your return to Pandora is going to have to wait a while longer. James Cameron has taken a typically ambitious approach to developing sequels to his box office smash Avatar, hiring a team of writers to get three sequels going all at once. And of course, he's also looking to up the ante from a technical level. But it looks like putting all of that together has been more complicated than Cameron expect.

Cameron has revealed that Avatar 2 would begin the next trilogy a full year later than expected, opening in December 2017. That would be followed by a new film around the same time each year. Cameron noted that the original 2016 date was perhaps "too ambitious", and that more time is needed to iron out the details...

Cameron: "There's a layer of complexity in getting the story to work as a saga across three films that you don't get when you're making a stand-alone film. We're writing three simultaneously. And we've done that so that everything tracks throughout the three films. We're not just going to do one and then make up another one and another one after that. And parallel with that, we're doing all the design. So we've designed all the creatures and the environments."

It has already been six years since Avatar revolutionized blockbuster cinema, and there's some question whether audiences will be excited for more after so much time away.  [Yahoo!]