James Cameron isn't saying much about Avatar 2, but he did suggest that things are moving along now.

Cameron appeared on the red carpet for the premiere of the movie The Dark Horse this week where he was asked about the progress of Avatar 2.

"We do performance capture work. You have to think of it more like an animated film, so it's not really shooting per se. It's a lot of performance capture work, so yeah, we're getting into that," he told The Associated Press.

Beyond this he is keeping everything under lock and key, stating: "It's top secret. Remember The Manhattan Project, did they talk about that?"

Avatar 2 has been pushed back from its release date of December 2017, with a tentative but unofficial plan for a 2018 release at the earliest. In its December 2017 place, Disney is releasing Star Wars: Episode VIII.

Whenever Avatar 2 is in fact released, it will be about a decade after the release of the first movie. Avatar was a huge global success and remains the highest grossing movie of all time worldwide at $2.788 billion. The film also went on to make a splash at that year's Oscars, nominated in nine categories and winning Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography and Best Visual Effects.

It remains to be seen if interest will remain in the Avatar franchise by the time the sequel is released. Either way, Cameron has a lot riding on its success, as he intends to film Avatar 2, 3 and 4 back-to-back-to-back.

Original stars Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang and Sigourney Weaver are all expected to return for the sequels.

Cameron spoke in January about the development process for all three Avatar sequels.

"I'm in the process of doing another pass through all three scripts right now," Cameron admitted. "Just refining. That's in parallel with the design process. The design process is very mature at this point. We've been designing for about a year and a half. All the characters, settings and creatures are all pretty much [set]."

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