James Cameron is on the publicity trail for the extended edition of Avatar and spoke to the New York Times about Cleopatra. and says the subject has always fascinated him “There’s a Cleopatra project in work, meaning that it’s been in development at Sony. And it’s a subject that’s always fascinated me. So yeah, I’ve been talking to them about it but no decisions have been made. But it sounds hot, doesn’t it? I mean, Angelina Jolie and Cleopatra? To me, that’s like a slam dunk. Whether I wind up doing it or not, I think it’s going to be a great project.”
Moving on to the sequel to the highest grossing movie of all time, Cameron told Comingsoon that Avatar 2 and 3 will be one large production "Our plan right now is to do two and three as a single large production and release them a year apart. In order to do that, we have to refine our technical processes beyond the end of where we were finishing 'Avatar' one a year ago. We need to future-proof ourselves out five or six years to the end of the third film."
Cameron is also banging away at the keyboard for the Avatar novelisation which he says has far more back story about Pandora, including the human arrival and Sigourney Weaver’s character Grace."The novel's a big project," said Cameron, "It's not a novelization... I asked myself, 'If this had been based on a book, what would that book have been?' It ends conterminously with the end of the movie. I'm not going to give you one frame beyond that. But how about the 30 years before Jake came to Pandora? The discovery of the planet? Grace's arrival there? All the back story and the history of Earth. All the context and then everything lateral to what you see in the movie. Whether it's things that are happening off-camera or things that are happening inside the characters' heads."
Some great tidbits floating around, in particular the NY Times article is well worth a read in full.
