Avatar Prequel

The Untitled Avatar Prequel is a proposed prequel to Avatar. The film was announced in 2012 by James Cameron, with production to follow the conclusion of the first trilogy, but subsequent marketing language has stepped away from the concept.http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/05/james-cameron-on-chinese-filmmakers-censorship-and-potential-co-productions/http://www.showbiz411.com/2012/06/26/james-cameron-will-film-three-avatar-sequels-at-the-same-time
==Plot==
Cameron's 2012 comment to MTV: "I haven't really put pen to paper on it, but basically it goes back to the early expeditions to Pandora, and kind of what went wrong between the humans and the Na'vi and what it was like to be an explorer in a completely unknown world. Because when we drop in, even in the first film in , as it will be known in the future, we're dropping into a process that's 35 years in to a whole colonization. ... The only thing left to do is go back to see what it was like on those first expeditions and create some new characters that then become legacy characters in later films. It's a plan."http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1693478/james-cameron-avatar-4.jhtml According to Collider, The film would have detailed Grace’s experiences building her academy and learning about the Na’vi.https://collider.com/avatar-prequel-sigourney-weaver-grace-augustine/
==Development==
In early 2012, three Avatar films were planned- the original, along with two sequels, then only known as Avatar 2 and Avatar 3. That May, Cameron hinted that there would perhaps be a fourth movie produced,https://archive.nytimes.com/mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/05/james-cameron-on-chinese-filmmakers-censorship-and-potential-co-productions/ and on September 10th, 2012, it was announced that the fourth film would be a prequel. Many news articles from the time used the working title Avatar 4, reflecting the fact that it would be produced after Avatar 3, even though it would be chronologically before the other films.
In 2013, changes happened behind the scenes including the addition of co-writers for all future Avatar films. Major writing adjustments affected the rest of the franchise, including an entirely different script for Avatar 2, which eventually became The Way of Water. Many of the concepts alluded to in early interviews from before that point, such as sequels exploring other moons of Polyphemus, were discarded in favour of the new stories.
Avatar 4 was greenlit in 2013 with Josh Friedman co-writing, but media language from that point onward referred to the fourth movie as a sequel. The major April 2016 press release in particular referred to Avatar 2 through 5 as "four sequels".http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/cinemacon-james-cameron-announces-four-884060 The hypothetical prequel is likely unrelated to the sequel which now uses the same working title.
The other script from the 2010-2013 era, the former Avatar 2 script, was not filmed but instead adapted in comic book form as The High Ground. The status of the prequel remains unknown.
==References==
Category:Films