James Cameron Confirms 'Avatar 2' Won't Arrive In 2018, Make Your Fake Surprised Face Now

It's been over seven years since James Cameron brought Avatar into theaters and it became the highest grossing movie of all time. Since then, the loyal group of fans have been waiting for the director to follow it up with his promised sequels. The number of sequels that James Cameron has promised grew to four last year with an announcement at CinemaCon, and since then we've expected them to arrive starting in 2018. But guess what? That's not gonna happen.

Find out the disappointing news James Cameron had about the Avatar 2 release date below.

James Cameron took time out of his busy Avatar schedule to team up with Israeli-Canadian journalist Simcha Jacobovici to figure out if the lost city of Atlantis actually existed in a new documentary called Atlantis Rising, premiering on Discovery this Sunday. While talking about the project with The Star, discussion inevitably turned to the development of the Avatar 2, and that's when James Cameron delivered the update that we all knew was coming:

"Well, 2018 is not happening. We haven't announced a firm release date. What people have to understand is that this is a cadence of releases. So we're not making Avatar 2. We're making Avatar 2, 3, 4 and 5. It's an epic undertaking. It's not unlike building the Three Gorges dam. (Laughs) So I know where I'm going to be for the next eight years of my life. It's not an unreasonable time frame if you think about it. It took us four-and-a-half years to make one movie and now we're making four. We're full tilt boogie right now. This is my day job and pretty soon we'll be 24-7. We're pretty well designed on all our creatures and sets. It's pretty exciting stuff. I wish I could share with the world. But we have to preserve a certain amount of showmanship and we're going to draw that curtain when the time is right."

We shouldn't be surprised that Avatar 2 is being delayed from its presumed December 2018 release date, especially since he wants technology like glasses-free 3D to be utilized for the sequels. At this point, I just wish James Cameron and 20th Century Fox would stop making announcements about Avatar sequels until they know exactly when it's going to be released. It's obvious they can't and won't tell us anything else about the movies, so I hope that they stop touting James Cameron around to make announcements to which he can't stick.

Even though Avatar 2 isn't arriving in 2018, that doesn't mean the rest of the movies will get pushed back. Since all four of the Avatar sequels are being made at the same time, it's conceivable that each one could be released each year after the first one arrives, whenever that may be. Then again, the previous schedule gave two years between each release, so Cameron might require that much time in post-production to get everything right.

Sorry, Avatar fans, you're just gonna have shine it on just a little bit longer. In the meantime, the new Avatar theme park land may give you an idea where all of this is going.