James Cameron has been talking Avatar, and you know what that means: speculation time! We're a ways out from the second movie of a planned trio, pegged for a 2014 release. Cameron didn't say much about the story in his interview with Fox News (via AICN), but he did confirm that the unfolding story across the three films may not be as self-contained as many of us had expected.

"We’re shooting two films back-to-back, so I’m writing two scripts, not one, which will complete a free-film story arc – not really a trilogy, but just an overall character arc, so I’m pretty excited about that,” he said. Presumably this means that movie No. 2 will pick up sometime after the events of the first and that, although the second and third are being written and filmed back to back, they won't be connected by a cliffhanger.

Cameron's reference to "an overall character arc" suggests we'll follow Sam Worthington's Jake Sully as he continues his evolution from human to full-blown Na'vi. The director also confirmed that the early development work has begun.

“We’re doing a lot of preliminary work right now on new software and new animation techniques and so on," he said. "We’re creating a new facility in Manhattan Beach so everybody that’s not already dead is coming back.”

AICN rightly notes that Cameron's phrasing there is a little strange, the whole "everybody that's not already dead" thing. Is it a reference to Sigourney Weaver, a suggestion that she's not coming back? Or is it just a little bit of very bizarrely placed black humor?