Fans of the blockbuster adventure movie Avatar may have to wait a little bit longer after award-winning director James Cameron announced that the return to Pandora will be pushed back a year. The first installment of the planned three Avatar sequels was supposed to come out in 2017.

"There's a layer of complexity in getting the story to work as a saga across three films that you don't get when you're making a standalone film," Cameron said in an interview with the Associated Press.

This should come as a big disappointment for Avatar fans, although the delay is something that should not come as a surprise. Given the scale of the project and Cameron's reputation as a perfectionist, all could be for the greater good of the fans and of course on how the sequel would fare in the box office.

"We're not just going to do one and then make up another one and another one after that," Cameron said. "And parallel with that, we're doing all the design. So we've designed all the creatures and the environments."

The first sequel was set to be shown in December of this year, with the second to follow in 2017 with the third one coming a year later.

AVATAR 2, 3, and 4 will be produced by Cameron and Jon Landau through their Lightstorm Entertainment banner. Like the original film, Lightstorm will work with Joe Letteri and his team at WETA Digital to realize the worlds of the sequels.

AVATAR was written by Cameron from an idea he nurtured for over a decade, while working on the technology necessary to realize its wholly imagined world. Working with WETA Digital, Cameron created a fully immersive 3D cinematic experience of a new kind, where revolutionary technology that was invented to make the film disappeared into the emotion of the characters and the epic nature of the story.