Titanic’s 3D rerelease this Friday is opening up director James Cameron and co. to new questions regarding when we’ll finally return to Pandora. Renn called this back in January, but it’s sounding more and more definitive that we won’t be revisiting Pandora’s floating mountains any time soon. Empire Online caught up with producer Jon Landau who offered up the following:

“We’re not naming dates, but I think 2014 will be a tough date for us to make. It’s about getting it right… Movies make release dates; release dates don’t make movies”.

And about the production overall:

“We’ve started already,” he says. “WETA are already working and we have our core team, (animation supervisor) Richie Baneham and (digital effects supervisor) Nolan Murtha, working with us. And we’re working on underwater performance-capture.”

We’ve known for awhile that Cameron was planning some deep-sea danger for this next installment, but it’s interesting to now find out what depths (sorry) they’re going to to achieve photo-realistic cat people underwater.

I’ve only ever seen Avatar once; I can’t say I’ve had much desire to revisit it. It serves as an interesting tech demo but as a film it’s something much less. The finest 3D imaging ever captured still wasn’t enough to save a shoddy script with a limp narrative. I once thought I was watching Avatar on cable but it turned out it was just Dances With Wolves with my TV’s tint all out of whack. Sad, because for a second it was much better than I remembered it.