Eventual 'Avatar 4' Will Be A Prequel, Says James Cameron

Director James Cameron is thinking through his hallmark "Avatar" saga in detail that would make George Lucas proud.

We'll all understand why the Oscar winner responsible for the two highest-grossing films of all time is exercising such foresight as to start thinking about a prequel fourth film before production has even begun on his planned first two direct sequels. As he joked with MTV.com, it's not like he has much source material laid out before him as certain colleagues have.

"You know, ['The Lord of the Rings' and 'The Hobbit' director] Peter Jackson had it easy, he already had the books," Cameron quipped. "Now if I had a time machine I could go forward and watch the movies and then come back, but I don't!"

Indeed, if there's to be a fourth film following back-to-back-shot second and third films set for possible 2014 and 2015 releases, it will be what Cameron considers a necessary step back to the Land of Exposition. With a collector's-edition DVD and Blu-ray release of the record breaker hitting shelves Sept. 10, Cameron claims he's already got his idea in mind. This indeed sounds less like Jackson and unsettlingly more like akin to the three ill-conceived, worse-received prequels George Lucas supposedly wrote at the same time he wrote the "first" three "Star Wars" movies.

"When we drop in, even in the first film in 'Avatar 1,' as it will be known in the future, we're dropping into a process that's 35 years in to a whole colonization," Cameron continued, believing there are still many, many stories to be told of the struggles between humans and the blue, cat-like Na'vi. "That will complete an arc and if that leads into more, we'll start, not imitating 'Star Wars,' but it's a logical thing to do because we'll have completed the thematic arc by the end of three. 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."

As it now stands, making the next two sequels has already been a two-year journey, Cameron said. All in the name of breaking his creativity's few dams.

"It was a hideously complex process to make that film and a lot has been said about that, but we don't want it to be done in the same prototypical way as the first one, we want it to be a much smoother workflow just for creativity reasons," Cameron said in the interview clip below.

Watch the whole thing, and tell us: should Cameron be already thinking this far ahead?