With Cameron’s Titanic getting a 3D rerelease in a few months, producer Jon Landau recently spoke at a screening of the previous biggest movie ever.  According to Entertainmentwise, Landau casually dropped a new timetable for the science fiction trilogy, saying, “We are excitedly working on it as we speak and it will be four or so years before it will be out.”

To bust some basic arithmetic, that means we wouldn’t be seeing Avatar 2 until 2016.  Given that Cameron’s plan has been to shoot both films simultaneously and release them a year apart, Avatar 3 would presumably arrive in 2017.

This makes a bagful of sense.  Though the 2014 date has been bandied about plenty, star Sam Worthington revealed this week that he’s not sure Cameron’s even written the first sequel yet, and the actor was fairly in the dark about just when production would get underway.  Besides, Cameron has never been a filmmaker overly concerned with meeting a release date, not at the expense of properly mind-melting spectacle.

Landau, being a producer, continued waxing enthusiastic and confirmed that design work on the sequels is indeed well underway.  “We are excited,” he said.  “And we have a lot of the same team working with us, some great design and ideas and some great themes hopefully.”