James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ topped the box office over the weekend, to no one’s surprise, taking in $77million domestically and $232million worldwide.

The Alien world presented in 3-D and IMAX took Cameron years to bring to the big screen. And he plans to make a trilogy out of it. Cameron talked about his plans with MTV News, saying, “I have a trilogy-scaled arc of story right now, but I haven’t really put any serious work into writing a script.”

But MTV says the next two films won’t require the four years of production time it took to perfect Avatar’s motion-capture technology and computer-generated environments and beings. “Part of what we set out to do is create a world and create these characters,” Cameron said. “From the time we capture and finish the capture, it’s literally nine to 10 months to get the CG characters working, to get their facial musculature working. … So now we have Jake, we have Neytiri. Sam can step right back into it, the characters will fit them like a glove, and we’ll just go on. So a lot of the start-up torque that had to be done for one movie really makes more sense if you play it out across several films.”

The ‘Titanic’ and ‘The Abyss’ director went on to explain, “My next goal is to refine the technique, make it easier so it doesn’t take as long. We were doing a lot of pioneering work on ‘Avatar.’ It wouldn’t have taken as long if we already knew exactly how to do it.”

MTV says the second ‘Avatar’ won’t be Cameron’s next project, however, and has speculated that, among the possibilities are ‘Forbidden Planet’ and ‘Battle Angel Alita,’ an adaptation of Yukito Kishiro’s popular manga.

(Image: 20th Century Fox)

Story provided by the Dish Information Corporation