Star Wars: The Force Awakens may the movie on everybody's minds, but James Cameron's 2009 sci-fi epic Avatar still (at least for the time being) reigns as king of the box office, with more than $2.7 billion earned.

Given those numbers, it's more than a little surprising that it's taken so long for an Avatar sequel to get off the ground. It looks like a sequel is finally set to arrive in December of 2017, according to the director himself in an interview with the Montreal Gazette (via Comingsoon.net).

"Christmas of '17 is the target," Cameron says about Avatar 2. "At least, that's what we've announced."

That's just the beginning. Two more Avatar films, for a total of three sequels, are set to release after Avatar 2 in 2017.

"But I don't consider that to be as important as the fact that when we get all three films done, we drop them a year apart," Cameron says. "I call it a meta-narrative that runs across the three movies. Each film stands alone, but it also tells one much larger story."

It's for that reason work on the sequel has taken so long, as Cameron and his team aren't simply doing planning and pre-production on one film but three.

"We have design more or less finished, which is an enormous task. It's been about a two-year task," he says. "(We've finished) all the creatures and the landscapes, and the new worlds within the world of Pandora that you see. The writing is ongoing, but almost finished. Technical development is done. Stages are done. Infrastructure. So we're really poised to start after the first of the year."

That's a whole lot of Pandora for fans to take in, but after an eight-year wait, perhaps it will be worth it to have the trilogy of films releasing so quickly, one after another.