Joe Letteri, the Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor behind The Hobbit, is currently on an interview tour trying to explain to people who didn’t like 48FPS that they’re probably just too old to give it a chance. The line of thinking seems to be that it isn’t ugly, it’s just that people are so entrenched in their experiences with reliable old 24FPS that their eyes can’t properly attain the beauty. But it turns out that 48FPS isn’t what we need to be worried about. It’s 60FPS. In one of his conversations, Letteri explained that James Cameron was considering using the even higher frame rate for Avatar 2. “That’s closer to where persistence of vision almost disappears,” said Letteri. “In fact, these discussions came out of when we noticed the effect of that in Avatar. And we were brainstorming with Jim on how to fix it — well, this is inherent in the photography and the only thing you can do is go shorter shutter, but that introduces strobing, or you can go higher frame rate. We started experimenting with higher frame rate [from a standpoint of] how do we solve the problem?. . . It looks like something happening live.”

We’ve known from the very beginning that James Cameron intended on making a sequel to his wildly successful foray into 3D filmmaking, Avatar. We’ve had indication that he might even have plans for several sequels for Avatar, stretching the thing out to encompass an entire trilogy. Word was that the upcoming journeys into the world of Pandora were going to deal heavily with exploring its underwater locations, a prospect that sounded promising, given all of the development of underwater technologies Cameron has done over the years. But when the director started talking about how he might even make three more Avatar sequels, and how he didn’t plan on making movies that weren’t Avatar related ever again…the guy started to sound a little crazy. Well, crazy or not, it indeed looks like that’s going to be the plan. Showbiz 411 has quotes from Avatar actress Sigourney Weaver confirming that Cameron has plans for three more sequels, and that they’re all going to be shot at the same time. This all but confirms that we’ll have to sit through an entire block of films about blue-skinned eco-warriors. Weaver’s comments come with the addendum that she has no idea how long the filming is going to take, how any of it is going to work, and that her job is to “just show up.”

With a dormant development arm, James Cameron has fully committed himself to holding his breath underwater and exploring the depths of narrative that he can mine from Pandora and the world of Avatar. A sequal and a threequel were already in the mix, but The Playlist is noting that Cameron seems more than open about an Avatar 4. It was 14 years from first draft to finished film, and its been almost 3 years since that sci-fi epic was released, so if the prospect of 3 more seems like it would take up the rest of Cameron’s sane days, it’s because they just might. The director looks to be quitting the original story game. “I’ve divided my time over the last 16 years over deep ocean exploration and filmmaking. I’ve made two movies in 16 years, and I’ve done eight expeditions. Last year I basically completely disbanded my production company’s development arm. So I’m not interested in developing anything. I’m in the Avatar business. Period. That’s it. I’m making Avatar 2, Avatar 3, maybe Avatar 4, and I’m not going to produce other people’s movies for them. I’m not interested in taking scripts,” said Cameron.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s the King of all nightly movie-related link dumps. You get twice the intelligence, half the idiocy, one quarter the amount of snark and exactly the same amount of actual news as other sites will give you. Plus, we always end with something fun. So stick around and read a while. We begin this evening with a shot from The Hunger Games featuring Josh Hutcherson as Peeta and Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss. Wait. Is there a reason why these characters have such stupid names? Or is it just to do with the future? I need to get around to reading these books, but I don’t know if I can deal with these names. Anyway, I like their tracksuits. I didn’t know this story was set in communist Russia.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s the roughest, toughest, meanest movie news column around. It also owns one of those silly shirts and smokes cigars. Of that, you can be sure. We begin our newsy journey tonight with a photo of three f*ckin’ guys you might have heard of on the set of The Expendables 2, proving once and for all that witty banter, big scarfs and an awful flowered shirt will be part of the highly anticipated testostisequel. All I can think is… someone needs to get to dat choppa!

Recently Fox News had a chat with director James Cameron about his upcoming sequels to his biggest-blockbuster-ever, blue-aliens-in-the-rainforest movie Avatar. Strangely enough, they framed the interview around the idea of economic growth for America (which is especially weird given the anti-industry, anti-imperialist message of the first film), but they also managed to get some quotes about his filming plans and how he’s approaching the writing process for the next two films.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news round-up column that didn’t mean to take the night off last night, but was forced into it by some “internet connectivity issues.” Which means, plainly, that its internet provider sucks sometimes. And things happen. Like trains — sometimes they get blown up in small town in Ohio, unleashing unknown terrors upon small-town, late-70s folk. Shit happens, y’know? My confession of the evening is that I was able to see Super 8 this morning. Reviews are under embargo for now, so I can’t share too much, but know this: whatever level of excitement you hold for it, you’re probably on the right track. Moving on, but not too far, Empire has a great interview with producer Steven Spielberg and Spielberg Jr., director J.J. Abrams. You can check it out after the jump. It’s not spoilery, as Abrams is a good keeper of secrets. But if you want to go in completely untainted, skip ahead and there’s plenty of other news to read.

A mysterious but reportedly familiar source has told Coming Attractions that the continued earthquakes at the bottom of the ocean are going to become a big problem for James Cameron’s Avatar 2 plans. The director has made it very clear that much of the second film is going to take place under water, and that in true James Cameron fashion he is going to spend a gabillion dollars developing new technologies to blow all of our minds with bottom of the ocean filming that up to this point was impossible. Or at least, he was going to. Now that might not be so impossible made possible.

There’s something mysteriously positive about the idea of shooting sequels back-to-back. It makes it seem as though the filmmakers have a definitive plan that will come together as a singular vision instead of a third film slammed into production by the machine despite almost no resemblance to the characters we fell in love with in prior installments. It seems that way, but it doesn’t always work that way. For each Lord of the Rings there’s a Pirates of the Caribbean. Now, James Cameron is tossing his ship out into the ocean to join those crews that went before him – promising that Avatar 2: Organically Electric Boogaloo and Avatar 3 will be shot together and released one year apart.

Your daily recommended allowance of random movie stuff, stories that fell through the cracks, and news you can’t use.

When James Cameron talks about his next project, we will always be listening. There is always necessity for tempered excitement though, as Cameron is not the sort of filmmaker who moves fast from project to project…

On the day when James Cameron’s Avatar finally eclipses the last of Titanic’s major box office records, all of the talk is not of the past — the 1997 run that made James Cameron “King of the World,” but of the future.