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.

We’ve suspected (or known) for quite some time, pretty much since the first film, that Sigourney Weaver was going to come back for James Cameron’s Avatar 2, 3, and 4, which are all scheduled to begin production at the same time later this year. She’s said she’ll be back, Cameron has said she’ll be back, and even though her character, Grace, dies in Avatar, we didn’t see that as much of an impediment to her return. This is Hollywood after all, where people routinely come back from the dead. We’re not easily surprised. Well now it’s official that Weaver will return, and we have potential news on how as well.

Last month in an interview, Weaver said, “my part is a little different in each one…I’ll transform somewhat.” See, we told you her return was basically a done deal. She and Cameron have even hinted at various ways she could return, but now that things are getting closer—the scripts for all three movies are reportedly finished—and production is imminent, things are getting a bit more in depth.

Writing a movie is rather serious undertaking. Writing three movies at the same time is a hellacious task and just seems kind of mean to yourself. Lucky for us, James Cameron is just this kind of masochistic bastard and is working on three movies at once. Sure, he has help, but he’s in the process of cranking out screenplays for Avatar 2, 3, and 4.

These aren’t tiny movies either, if the 2009 original—the highest grossing movie of all time—is any indication, all three of these sequels are going to be monumental feats in their own right. And since he plans to shoot all three films back-to-back-to-back, the scripts need to be in workable order before production begins, and he’s hired a pool of writers to help him along the way.

As sci-fi fans, one thing we can never get enough of is Sigourney Weaver. That means that the fact we’re going to get Avatar 2, 3, and 4, and that she is going to play a big role in all three sequels, is good news. You may wonder exactly how they’re going to pull off that feat—her character dies in the first film, so they have that problem to work around—but the 64-year-old actress recently provided a few hints about her role in the upcoming chapters.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with James Cameron’s 2009 science fiction adventure—there must be at least a couple of you, maybe—it is the single highest grossing film of all time. Set on the alien world of Pandora, the story has often been compared to Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves, and follows a former Marine who inhabits an avatar in order to infiltrate the planet’s native population so humans can mine for a rare substance called unobtanium. No, that last part is not a joke. He, of course, falls in love with a girl, realizes what shitbags the people are being, and switches sides.

We’ve only been to the far away world of Pandora the one time, but if James Cameron has his druthers—and he’s James Cameron, for crying out loud, and James Cameron gets what James Cameron wants—we’re going back, a lot. The visionary director has plans for three sequels to his 2009 hit Avatar. You may have heard of it, it’s the highest grossing movie of all time. Though he’s been talking about the follow up trips since even before the first film opened, Cameron now says the scripts for episodes two, three, and four will all be done in short order.

During a Reddit AMA, Cameron talked about the process involved in bringing the new films to life. He explains, “They’re essentially all in preproduction now, because we are designing creatures, settings, and characters that span all three films. And we should be finished with all three scripts within the next, I would say, six weeks.”

With the expected release date of Avatar 2 in 2016, it will have been seven years between the first movie, released in 2009, and its sequel. That’s a long time, but director James Cameron is developing new filmmaking technology and software to further explore the world of Pandora in three new movies. It seems that if the project isn’t unique and challenging, the 59-year-old director isn’t interested. In an interview with RTL, the Avatar director opened up about the new sequel films and the challenges he’s facing to bring them to the big screen beginning in 2016.

All three movies upcoming Avatar movies will be made concurrently, and are expected to go into production this spring. Cameron says:

We’re still in the early stages. Right now we’re developing the software. I’m writing the scripts. We’re designing all the creatures and characters and the settings, and so on. So I’m not actually directing yet, but I’m doing all the other creative processes that lead up to that.