The trip back to Pandora just got a little longer. James Cameron announced that the sequel to "Avatar" won't be out until 2017 because writing a trilogy that will fit together perfectly is much more complicated that he anticipated. Remember, this is coming from someone who's been to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest and creepiest part of the ocean, so we can only imagine what he's got planned for the peeps of Pandora. Cameron is actually planning three more "Avatar" movies that will be released a year apart, so those have all been bumped back.

Cameron said, "There's a layer of complexity in getting the story to work as a saga across three films that you don't get when you're making a stand-alone film... We're writing three simultaneously. And we've done that so that everything tracks throughout the three films. We're not just going to do one and then make up another one and another one after that. And parallel with that, we're doing all the design. So we've designed all the creatures and the environments."

Stay tuned for more news from the land of Na'vi. Disney is currently hard at work building an "Avatar"-inspired attraction at Animal Kingdom - but that probably won't be done until 2017.

[Via The Hollywood Reporter]