It turns out that James Cameron didn't take his Battle Angel Alita adaptation off the table when he announced he's in the business of making Avatar movies going forward.

Cameron plans to at least shoot Avatar 2 and 3 back to back and could then move on to make a fourth film, but producer Jon Landau said that doesn't mean the Battle Angel project is dead. It just means Cameron will take longer to make it.

"We'll focus on Avatar for the next four or five years," Landau told Sweidsh website MovieZine (via ComingSoon.net). "Hopefully right after that … I am confident you will see it. It's one of my favorite stories."

He continued about the project, "I think it is an incredible story, a journey of self-discovery of a young woman. It is a movie that begs the question: 'What does it mean to be human? Are you human if you have a heart, are you human if you have a mind, are you human if you have a soul?' And I look forward to bringing that film to audiences."

Speaking of AvatarMTV News recently sat down with Cameron to talk to him about future installments. He said he's writing the scripts for Avatar 2 and 3 together as "one big thing," but Avatar 4 -- if it happens -- will go a different route.

"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," he said. "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."

That whole process will probably take Cameron the next few years to complete, but he might not be done with the Avatar world yet. If Avatar 4 happens and is a success, that could kick off a whole new series of films set on the world of Pandora that follows a different group of characters.

"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," Cameron said. "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."