“Avatar” producer Jon Landau compares James Cameron filming the four sequels at the same time as doing a ‘miniseries on a super scale.’ The first sequel opens this Christmas.
James Cameron is currently shooting multiple sequels of his hit movie “Avatar” at the same time.
Producer Jon Landau explains the mindset they are all in to pull it off.
“Avatar 2″ opens in theaters this Christmas.
James Cameron is currently shooting not one, not two, but three “Avatar” sequels at the same time. And he’ll soon begin work on a fourth!
After the explosive success of the 2009 fantasy movie that pushed the boundaries of computer graphics and 3D, while becoming the highest-grossing movie of all time, Cameron has been mapping out how to continue the story into a franchise.
And like all things Cameron is involved in, what he came up with is extremely ambitious.
It was announced last September that Cameron had begun production on four “Avatar” sequels in succession on a budget of over $1 billion.
All the movies are planned to open over Christmas from 2018-2023, and the only way to pull that off is to shoot different parts of all the movies at the same time. This is similar to what Peter Jackson did with his “Lord of the Rings” movies.
“Avatar” producer Jon Landau said the biggest challenge of all this was to make the cast and crew understand what they were getting into.
“I think what we had to get our heads around is the first ‘Avatar’ was a marathon,” Landau told Business Insider at CinemaCon while promoting Robert Rodriguez’s “Alita: Battle Angel.” “Now we’re running a triathlon.”
That meant putting the “Avatar” sequels in the scope, as Landau put it, of doing a “miniseries on a super scale.”
“There are segments of that miniseries that need to come to completion for the story arc, and then you build upon that,” he said. “Once we got our heads around that we’re really telling one big story, we were able to figure out how to plan it and schedule it. The cast is there and they are doing scenes from movie two today, movie three tomorrow. But we explained to them it’s not different than doing just one movie.”
We’ll see how it all comes together when the first “Avatar” sequel comes out this Christmas through 20th Century Fox.