James Cameron producing buddy Jon Landau has announced that the director is set to pen his first novel, and it will be a prequel to “Avatar.” For those of you who are cynical like us, yes, Cameron is actually going to write the thing himself. “Jim is going to write a novel himself,” said Landau. “Not a novelization — and there is a distinction. A novelization basically retells the story of the movie. Jim wants to write a novel that is a big, epic story that fills in a lot of things.”
So what will be covered in the prequel? “It would be something that would lead up to telling the story of the movie, but it would go into much more depth about all the stories that we didn’t have time to deal with — like the schoolhouse and Sigourney [Weaver’s character] teaching at the schoolhouse; Jake on Earth and his backstory and how he came here; [the death of] Tommy, Jake’s brother; and Colonel Quaritch, how he ended up there and all that,” said Landau.
However, writing a book isn’t exactly foreign territory for Cameron. His usual first step in writing a screenplay, is sketching out the story in novella format so we would imagine his approach will simply expand on that process. And not to look a gift horse in the mouth, if the novel is a success Landau and Cameron plan to Lucas the shit out of the franchise. They are open to commissioning other authors to continue writing stories that would be based on the ideas that Cameron has kicking around.
According to Landau, the novel will hopefully hit store shelves by the end of the year, but you just know some nerds are going to film their own adaptation of it anyway.
