James Cameron is the undisputed king of the box-office, whenever he releases a film. After making history with Titanic and passing the $1 billion mark, James Cameron made Avatar: $2.78 billion dollars at the worldwide box-office.

And that was just the beginning, since the director planned the Avatar movies as a quadrilogy. So, after the release of the first film, it was pretty obvious (given the numbers) that the audiences were very excited of a sequel.

However, 6 years have passed since then and James Cameron hasn't released anything new about the planned sequel - until yesterday.

Avatar 2 is delayed

As James Cameron said, the project is still on-going, but not on schedule. If he was planning on releasing the sequel in late 2016, now he says that it will be released in late 2017 - so a whole year later.

Why is that?

Because he wants to shoot the rest of the quadrilogy back to back and release the remaining 3 movies with a 1 year gap between them. This wouldn't be the first time this happens with some sequels - but this is the first time when 3 planned follow-ups are written at the same time.

Here's what he says

"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. [My team and I are] 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."

Losing steam?

Without a doubt, the buzz has disappeared almost completely since the first Avatar movie was released in 2009. And given this news, 2 more years will pass until the fans will return to Pandora.

Will this hurt the box-office success of the planned Avatar sequel?

If this was any other director, we would have thought so - however, this is James Cameron who has proved himself time and time again as a capable story teller. Furthermore, since this new sequel promises to show a different side of Pandora (the under-water side) and since the director has always pushed the technology further with each of his movies, we can bet that Avatar 2 will be as thrilling and as successful as the first installment.