If you’ve been making plans for December 2016, and they involve going to see the long-in-the-works Avatar 2, James Cameron’s sequel to his 2009, highest-grossing-movie-of-all-time, you might need to find something else to do. The release of the first of three planned films—Avatar 3 and Avatar 4 were slated to follow in consecutive years—has been pushed back a year.

All three films were originally planning to shoot back-to-back-to-back sometime early-ish this year, and be released in 2016, 2017, and 2018. That strategy has been delayed, as the first film now won’t debut until December 2017.

James Cameron is many things, but soft spoken and modest he is not. That’s part of what makes him so damn entertaining. With his Avatar 2, 3, and 4 all shooting back-to-back-to-back next year, you knew that was going to be at the forefront of his mind, and he’s got a lot to say on the matter, covering everything from how great they’re going to be to how they’re going to be “filmed.”

We expect a number of things from the upcoming movies, like a return to the magical alien world of Pandora, appearances from the likes of Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, and Sigourney Weaver, and dazzling special effects. Aside from that, however, we don’t know much about the actual films. Talking to Empire, Cameron didn’t reveal any details, but he did say something very promising. In his words the Avatar sequels are “gonna be bitchin’.”

When James Cameron dropped Avatar back in 2009, it was, as much as anything else, a technological showcase. Regardless of what you think of the rehashed story, we’re talking about a spectacular looking film, one that uses 3D and depth of field like few others before or since. Cameron pushed the boundaries of his cameras and equipment in the first film, and with Avatar 2, 3, and 4 getting closer and closer to becoming a reality, the director could take a similarly trailblazing approach to the sequels.

Cameron took 3D, which has, almost since its inception, been relegated to schlocky horror and gimmick-filled midnight movies, and used it to make something grand and beautiful. He’s also been a big proponent of increased frame rates. As it stands, there’s only been one big time film that’s tried to show in anything but the standard 24-frames-per-second, and that was Peter Jackson’s first Hobbit, which, by all accounts, was a failed experiment (the follow up, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug returned to a more traditional presentation). A report at THR, however, posits that Cameron and Avatar 2 (and Avatar 3 and 4 as they’re all filming together) could use a new technique and technology to leapfrog past that.

We’re about to embark on a massive expansion of the Avatar universe. Early next year James Cameron and 20th Century Fox plan to start filming Avatar 2, Avatar 3, and Avatar 4 back-to-back-to-back. One film will be released each year starting in 2016, and despite being that far away from seeing an actual movie on the screen, Cameron is already pumping up his latest ventures.

Talking to Variety, he doesn’t reveal any specific details about the new Avatar films, but he does disclose some of the things he hopes to accomplish, thematically, and how he wants the upcoming movies to comment on the current world.

Zoe Saldana is going to be very, very busy for the foreseeable future, and it’s almost all sci-fi. Guardians of the Galaxy hit big at the box office this weekend, and now that Guardians of the Galaxy 2 already has the green light from Marvel, this brings the running tally of big-time franchises she stars in up to three. There’s also Star Trek and a little thing called Avatar to contend with, and every last one of them has sequels on the docket. Avatar actually has three in the works, and Saldana recently indicated that those films could begin production soon.

Vulture caught up with the star, who plays the badass green assassin Gamora, at a recent Guardians showing, and asked about her schedule coming up. Though full, she seems excited about it, and it sounds like she’s just waiting for word and she’ll paint herself blue and return to the distant world of Pandora. She says:

James Cameron is packing up and heading back to the faraway world of Pandora for the foreseeable future, as he is getting ready to film Avatar 2, 3, and 4 back-to-back-to-back. After the 2009 original raked in a record-setting $2.8 billion, Fox is certainly optimistic that, with the three sequels at the center of their upcoming roster, they’ll be able to start printing their own money. Shooting a trio of movies consecutively necessitates having three finished scripts at the ready. Cameron brought in teams to work on each individual screenplay, but until now, we didn’t know who wrote what.

While Cameron handled the script for Avatar himself, like he has with many of his films, but realized that this was a herculean undertaking, and brought in teams of outside writers to work with on the follow ups. A while back, he talked about the process of writing three scripts simultaneously. Cameron basically collaborated with one writer, or team, on each story, bouncing back and forth, tweaking continuity and narrative to create a coherent trilogy of films. He compared the experience to working in the writer’s room on his short-lived TV series Dark Angel.