Cameron's "Avatar" pushed to '09

By: Karl Schneider
Date: Friday, December 22, 2006
Source: Independant

According to James Cameron in an interview with the British Independent newspaper, the release date of the upcoming sci-fi epic Avatar has been pushed until the Summer of 2009.

"I'll spend many months completing the special effects on Avatar, and it will not be released until the summer of 2009," Cameron told the paper. "It's quite a challenge, and for that reason, I embrace it."

"I felt I'd exhausted the treasury, and it was time to go back to work," Cameron said. "Avatar is a very ambitious sci-fi movie. ... It's a futuristic tale set on a planet 200 years hence. It's an old-fashioned jungle adventure with an environmental conscience. It aspires to a mythic level of storytelling."

"The film requires me to create an entirely new alien culture and language, and for that I want 'photo-real' CGI characters," Cameron said. "Sophisticated enough performance-capture animation technology is only coming on stream now. I've spent the last 14 months doing performance-capture work. The actor performs the character, and then we animate it."

Wait, wait, WAIT a second here.  Did Cameron just say that he was running out of money so he decided to 'go back to work'?  Someone tell me I am reading that quote wrong, because I had high hopes for this film.  He has to have something left in the bank from the HIGHEST GROSSING FILM OF ALL TIME!  Sheesh.