Man, I thought the Avatar sequels (and by sequels, I mean Avatar 2 and 3) had already finished filming. While I knew a sizable chunk of it would be performance capture, I thought they managed to film both the live-action chunks and the previously-mentioned digital stuff. I guess I was wrong, as a new report is stating that they have yet to actually film those parts of it.

And I suppose it makes sense. The first sequel isn’t set to hit until 2020, so there’s plenty of time to get the live-action pieces in front of cameras. But when will that be? During a recent Q&A for Alita: Battle Angel, producer Jon Landau gave an update, stating these portions will be done in New Zealand in the spring.

“We have completed our principal capture on Avatar 2, 3, and part of 4. We’re going to do our live-action filming in New Zealand in the spring of this year. We just announced today that we’ve cast Edie Falco to play General Ardmore, who is the head of the RDA forces. In typical Jim [Cameron] fashion he finds this powerful woman to play what could be very easily a male role if people were just to read the script.”

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Pretty cool that they even have the fourth film partially in the can…but surely that must mean they have the scripts done for all four sequels, right? Yup. It turns out that’s why things took so long.

“That’s what we waited for. We needed to have all the scripts done before we embarked on production. We needed to understand where the characters were going. Not only did we need to understand it, our cast needed to understand it. Our cast playing these roles needed to understand decisions they were making in movies 2 and 3, how it would affect them in movie 4. Because if they didn’t, they might not bring the same thing to it. So we waited to complete all four scripts before we ever embarked on doing the project.”

Sounds like a good approach…but will it be enough to help rekindle the enthusiasm it managed to lose over the past decade? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below! And if you’re interested in talking film, follow me on Twitter at @JamTheWriter!

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SOURCE: Collider