Could James Cameron’s Long-Gesating ‘Battle Angel’ Trump ‘Avatar 2’ As His Next Project?

“The films have to play as individual films, but they have a greater story arc that goes over the three-film cycle,” he told MTV in January of that year. “I think that’s how it works the best. I don’t think you want to just run people off the cliff after the second film” (“Avatar” itself was announced in June 2005 and was then known as “Project 880”).

But at the rate the director — who recently called the U.S. oil spill experts “morons” — makes films, most of us assumed, it would be at least another ten years until we saw a sequel appear (the gap between, “Titanic” and “Avatar” is twelve years).

And yes, Cameron has been talking about “Avatar” sequels for several months now and has hinted that “Avatar 2” is already mapped out and but what can we say, we still presumed the picture was several years away and might possibly not even be next.

But even THR is noticing tonight that when Cameron spoke at the All Things Digital conference, via the Wall Street Journal, he said his next film could come in the next three to four years, could possibly be “Avatar 2,” but could potentially also be, “some other big film that uses that same technology.”

This rings major bells. In 2005, at the same time that he announced “Avatar,” he also announced his intentions to make “Battle Angel,” a futuristic love story thriller about a 26th-century cyborg that he also envisioned as a trilogy in 3D.

Based on Yukito Kishiro‘s 12 popular Japanese graphic novels (titled “Battle Angel Alita”) about a nymphette who morphs into an action heroine, Cameron had reworked a script from Laeta Kalogridis who obviously helped write “Avatar” (though she has no credit), wrote “Shutter Island,” and has been credited as one of Hollywood’s most up and coming screenwriters. She also wrote Oliver Stone’s “Alexander,” and worked on scripts for “X-Men,” “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” early drafts of the live-action, “Wonder Woman,” “The Lone Ranger” and she’s currently adapting, “Ghost In The Shell” For Dreamworks (though she’s probably long done by now and is simply doing draft revisions).

“And with ‘Battle Angel,’ also, we’ll do the same thing [as ‘Avatar’],” Cameron told MTV in 2006. ” ‘Battle Angel’ is actually designed as a three-film cycle. So, the logic there is to make one and if it hits, boom-boom on the other two.”

We might be getting ahead of ourselves, but here’s the Amazon description of “Battle Angel.”

In the first volume of Yukito Kishiro’s Battle Angel Alita, Daisuke Ido discovers a badly damaged cyborg in the trash heap beneath the floating city of Tiphares, which he rebuilds and names Alita. She has no memory of her previous life, but when she is drawn into a battle with the monster Makaku, Alita realizes that she must uncover the dark secrets of her past.

Kishiro’s story is much more than a science-fiction adventure. Woven into the violent, roller-coaster plot is a strand of philosophical speculation. Battle Angel Alita takes us to a world where technology blurs the boundaries between human and machine, begging the question “What makes us who we are?”

Then again, Cameron was also developing an underwater adventure, “The Dive,” with screenwriter Dana Stevens (“City of Angels”) in 2005 as well, but maybe that’s not as epic or “big” enough for his taste. We’ll see. If another project came first and conservatively, “Avatar 2” has to wait say six years, is it weird that actors like Sam Worthington will have aged significantly? Or now that they are Na’vi and not humans perhaps it won’t matter at all…