James Cameron Pushes ‘Avatar’ Sequel Back a Whole Year

If you've been eagerly awaiting the first sequels to 2009's Avatar, I've got some bad news for you. At an industry event in New Zealand this week, James Cameron officially announced that the first instalment of the new trilogy has been pushed back a year from Christmas 2016 to Christmas 2017.

The reason for the delay is that Cameron hasn't finished writing the scripts...which means he hasn't submitted them to the folks over at 20th Century Fox...which means the folks over at 20th Century Fox haven't been able to establish a budget that would fund pre-production.

So what's the holdup with the scripts? According to Cameron, writing a triology is hard:

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.

Don't worry, though. I'm sure Cameron will eventually stumble upon some existing stories and themes he can recycle into a plot for his new Avatar trilogy. He just needs a little more time.

[via EW]