We are one step closer to returning to Pandora.

The director James Cameron said in a recent interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger for the 2020 Austrian World Summit that "Avatar 2" had completed filming and that filming for "Avatar 3" was "95%" complete and would be finished after he delivered "Avatar 2" for release.

The Oscar-winning director, who is in New Zealand making "Avatar 2" and "Avatar 3" simultaneously, told Schwarzenegger that the crew lost 4 1/2 months of production because of the novel coronavirus. The pandemic caused the movie's studio, Disney (which owns 20th Century Studios, which released the first movie as 20th Century Fox), to push back its release date to December 2022.

"Now that doesn't mean that I have an extra year to finish the film because the day we deliver 'Avatar 2' we'll just start working on finishing 'Avatar 3,'" Cameron said. "So where we are right now, I'm down in New Zealand shooting. We're shooting the remainder of the live action. We've got about 10% left to go. We're 100% complete on 'Avatar 2' and we're sort of 95% complete on 'Avatar 3.'"

Even with the live-action footage said to be nearing completion, however, the CGI-heavy films will still have a lot of work to go in postproduction.

Cameron has been talking about the sequel to "Avatar" as far back as when the original film opened back in 2009 and went on to become the highest-grossing movie of all time (until "Avengers: Endgame" took the title in 2019). "Avatar 2" has had countless release-date changes since its original date of 2014. And in that time Cameron has also revealed big plans for a franchise. If the second and third films are successful, Cameron has said, he plans to make movie Nos. 4 and 5.

Since the pandemic closed the industry in March, the "Avatar" franchise producer Jon Landau has sent out photos of the movies' production restart through his Instagram account.

Here's Sigourney Weaver filming an underwater scene for one of the sequels:

Here are Zoë Saldana and Sam Worthington with two new stars to the "Avatar" franchise, Kate Winslet and Cliff Curtis, filming in the massive 900,000-gallon performance-capture tank that was built in New Zealand for the sequels.

Cameron told Schwarzenegger that filming in New Zealand had been a big advantage because the country had continued to have one of the lowest rates of COVID-19 in the world.

"We're able to operate, we're able to shoot, and we're able to have a more or less normal life here, so we're very fortunate," Cameron said. "I don't see any roadblocks to us getting both pictures finished."

"Avatar 2" is set to open in theaters on December 16, 2022. "Avatar 3" is scheduled to arrive December 20, 2024.

Watch Cameron's chat with Schwarzenegger about the "Avatar" franchise:

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