James Cameron Plans To Truncate Battle Angel Alita

 

James Cameron isn’t exactly a man with much free time these days. He has Avatar to blame. Sure, it’s the top-grossing movie of all time and a groundbreaking achievement in visual effects and blah blah blah … but it’s a crazy timesuck. He’s going to be busy shepherding the second and third entries into existence for the next half a decade, at least. Which means, to some fans’ dismay, that certain other projects, including some cool ones with lots of promise, are going to fall by the wayside.

One such orphaned effort is Cameron’s planned adaptation of the manga Battle Angel Alita. He’s been talking about it for years, and was even suspected to have been working on it before Avatar was officially confirmed. However, it’s obviously been pushed aside for the time being to make way for the plight of the Na’vi. Cameron was out promoting this Friday’s release Sanctum, which he produced, when Collider asked for an update on Alita. It sounds like Cameron doesn’t want to give it up to someone else, though he also recognizes the need to scale back the massive story into something more manageable.

“I’m obviously going to be pretty busy for the next five years [with Avatar 2 and 3],” he said. “And so I had to consider, do I hand this project off to another director? And then I thought, ‘No, I love it too much. ’ It’s such a rich world. What I’m going to do is take the spine story and use elements from the first four books. So, the Motorball from books three and four, and parts of the story of one and two will all be in the movie.”

So there you have it. One movie spanning four books. I’m not familiar with the series so I can’t comment on how that might work, but it’s generally not a great idea to cut down huge, multi-volume stories into a single, two-hour work. If it even gets made at all. Then again, this is Cameron. So we’ll see.