If you were hoping for a brand new film property from James Cameron you are going to be severely disappointed. The man behind Terminator, Titanic and Avatar has told the New York Times that he’s done taking new scripts and developing new projects.

I’ve divided my time over the last 16 years over deep ocean exploration and filmmaking. I’ve made two movies in 16 years, and I’ve done eight expeditions. Last year I basically completely disbanded my production company’s development arm. So I’m not interested in developing anything. I’m in the “Avatar” business. Period. That’s it. I’m making “Avatar 2,” “Avatar 3,” maybe “Avatar 4,” and I’m not going to produce other people’s movies for them. I’m not interested in taking scripts. And that all sounds I suppose a little bit restricted, but the point is I think within the “Avatar” landscape I can say everything I need to say that I think needs to be said, in terms of the state of the world and what I think we need to be doing about it. And doing it in an entertaining way. And anything I can’t say in that area, I want to say through documentaries, which I’m continuing. I’ve done five documentaries in the last 10 years, and I’ll hopefully do a lot more.

If you were looking forward to his Battle Angel movie, which is basically about giant robots, you are probably never going to see it. Because of the amount of time and money it takes to develop an Avatar film, combined with Cameron’s love for adventuring, the ocean and documentary work he doesn’t have the time for anything else.

Although you could easily look at his comments and say “well, Battle Angel was in development!” Stop, please. Don’t expect anything other than Avatar from Cameron. He clearly loves the world and feels like he can say what he wants to say about the environment and the world in those films. Hell, he said that in the quote above.

As for the status of Avatar 2, Cameron says:

We’ve spent the last year and a half on software development and pipeline development. The virtual production methodology was extremely prototypical on the first film. As then, no one had ever done it before and we didn’t even know for two and half years into it and $100 million into it if it was going to work. So we just wanted to make our lives a whole lot easier so that we can spend a little more of our brainpower on creativity. It was a very, very uphill battle on the first film. So we’ve been mostly working on the tool set, the production pipeline, setting up the new stages in Los Angeles, setting up the new visual effects pipeline in New Zealand, that sort of thing. And, by the way, writing. We haven’t gotten to the design stage yet. That’ll be the next.

Do you even want another Avatar? Or have you had enough of the world of Pandora? [New York Times via /Film]

avatar 2, james cameron