Jezebel's Advent Calendar of Crap, Day 16: Avatar's Back

Remember four years ago, when everyone got baked and went to see Avatar? Today everyone got a reminder that James Cameron isn’t done with us yet. Variety reports he just locked down a deal to make three sequels in New Zealand. Mark your calendars for December 2016, December 2017 and December 2018.

Come on, dude, really?

To be fair, James Cameron is responsible for Terminator 2 and Aliens, both of them sequels and fantastic. But 3D movies aren’t the novelty they were in 2009. That means he’ll need a decent story this time, and, let me remind you, the plot of the original was a big fat Dances With Wolves mess.

So what’s Cameron’s plan for this go-round? According to the AP, he plans to broaden the perspective beyond protagonist Jake. But, uh, this doesn’t sound particularly promising: “We spread it around quite a bit more as we go forward. It’s really the story of his family, the family that he creates on Pandora. His extended family. So think of it as a family saga like ‘The Godfather.'”

Right. Because it’s so easy to make a family saga like The Godfather when you’ve got an iffy record, plot-wise.

Mostly, though, it sounds like this is going to be more random set pieces for his invented world:

“It’s going to be a lot of new imagery and a lot of new environments and creatures across Pandora,” he said. “We’re blowing it out all over the place. At first I thought I was going to take it onto other worlds as well, in the same solar system, but it turned out not to be necessary. I mean the Pandora that we have imagined will be a fantasy land that is going to occupy people for decades to come, the way I see it.”

How many hours of glowing trees and dino-bird Pegasus can viewers really take, though?

If only it were commercially feasible for James Cameron to just skip the story and make a travelogue called “Vistas of Pandora” and market it to stoners. Then we might have a solution on our hands.