Avatar 4 will be a prequel. But wait! Avatar 2 hasn’t even hit the theaters! Hang on, let me explain…

Avatar 2 and 3 are being shot back-to-back much like the 2nd and 3rd The Matrix films, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Parts 1 & 2…you get the idea. However creator James Cameron has already begun thinking up ideas for 4th installment stating that he’d like Avatar 4 to be a prequel.

“I haven’t really put pen to paper on it, but basically it goes back to the early expeditions of Pandora, and kind of what went wrong with the humans and the Na’vi and what that was like to be an explorer and living in that world…because when we drop in, even in the first film in ‘Avatar 1,’ as it will be known in the future, we’re dropping into a process that’s 35 years in to a whole colonization. That will complete an arc and if that leads into more, we’ll start, not imitating ‘Star Wars,’ but it’s a logical thing to do because we’ll have completed the thematic arc by the end of three. The only thing left to do is go back to see what it was like on those first expeditions and create some new characters that then become legacy characters in later films. It’s a plan.”
-James Cameron, Writer & Director

Although the story is still being written, Twentieth Century Fox aims to release Avatar 2 in December 2014, and Avatar 3 in December 2015.

Source: MTV