Strike whereas the iron is scorching: that’s the prevalent considering in Hollywood when it comes to creating a sequel. If you’ve a hit, get one other one out as quickly as potential. In 2009 and 2010, James Cameron’s Avatar wasn’t simply scorching, it was the floor of the sun. The 3D film concerning the blue folks on an alien planet rapidly grew to become the highest-grossing movie of all time. Plans for a sequel had been mentioned virtually instantly. Then 13 years handed.

Thirteen years. That’s how lengthy followers have been ready for James Cameron to return again to Pandora. It’s taken so lengthy the studio that made the unique movie, twentieth Century Fox, doesn’t even exist anymore. (It was bought by Disney beginning in 2017.) However, it’s not like that point simply handed idly. Cameron and his staff spent years on the movie, with launch dates going again to 2014 all scheduled earlier than being canceled. Along the way in which, proper by Cameron’s aspect, was producer Jon Landau, and he spoke to io9 concerning the lengthy delays and provided up some readability.

“Script, design, and production,” Landau stated when requested the three major causes for the delay. “[We wrote] four scripts, not one, and that takes time. You can’t go, ‘Okay, we like movie three [but] we’re not there yet on movie two,’ or vice versa. We wanted to define, for the characters, their whole journey … We had to have that in place for the production design team to design. Because there might be a vehicle in movie two that we call out as a background vehicle, but it plays a big role in movie four. If they don’t know that they’re not going to design it that way. Then we chose, for efficiency and logistical reasons, to shoot movie two, three, and the first act of part four, all together. So those are the [main] three reasons.”

What Landau solely alludes to in his response is that the unique plan wasn’t 4 sequels. It was, initially, simply going to be three sequels (he stated studies that it was ever simply two sequels are inaccurate). So, how did a complete different sequel get tacked onto the story?

“What happened was Jim had 1,500 pages of notes,” Landau stated. “We brought in three teams of writers and they worked for six months to break down those notes into three scripts. We then assigned those scripts to the writers with Jim writing on each one of them, and as we got into that process, we realized we weren’t including everything we wanted to include. And it was at that point that we went from three [sequels] to four.”

The transfer from three sequels to 4 was introduced on April 14, 2016. At that point, Avatar 2 was supposed to return out in December of 2018, with the fifth film in December 2023. That clearly didn’t occur. The dates continued to shift till 2019, when Avatar 2 was scheduled for launch in December 2021. Landau thought that was going to be the date. Then the world modified.

“Pre-pandemic, we were on track for a ‘21 date but it was a tight ‘21 date,” he stated. “I mean, look, we work to the last minute. Why? Because we want to deliver the best quality. We don’t want to say, ‘Oh, we finished the movie 12 weeks ago.’ If we did that, we just ran out of good ideas. [Laughs] So 2021 was going to be a tight release date. And then the pandemic struck, and we were supposed to be back in February [2020] for a second block of filming. We couldn’t do it until June. When we did it in June, we had to do it under different conditions that slowed down that process. So what was supposed to be an X weeks shoot was X times one and a half, and that just put us in a place where we couldn’t make 2021. So that was the push to 2022.”

And that’s how, virtually 13 years to the day after the unique, Avatar: The Way of Water makes its method into theaters on December 16. A movie that has been tirelessly labored on for a decade to arrange three extra movies which have been equally scrutinized for a similar period of time. And, if early buzz is to be believed, Cameron and Landau have made it greater than definitely worth the wait.

Want extra io9 information? Check out when to anticipate the newest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s subsequent for the DC Universe on movie and TV, and every part you’ll want to learn about James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water.