James Cameron Updates Battle Angel Alita Status

James Cameron has been talking about potentially remaking the manga Battle Angel Alita for some time now, but it's always seemed like a distant reality. Now Cameron is hinting that the tech he's developed for Avatar will be instrumental in Alita, and that the film may actually be closer than we thought. Dare we get our hopes up?

His response:

The mixture of live-action and CG is a little trickier in 3-D than it is 2-D. Now we see it's good to have done Avatar first before Battle Angel, because the tricky scenes are where you're blending live-action photography, stereoscopic photography and CG.

Shooting live stuff in 3-D and then adding CG characters and landscapes beyond that, that's a little tricky.

I really dug Avatar's use of 3D live-action with CG from the footage I've seen, and it's heartening to know that he's going to stick with it for Alita. It was actually more compelling than the all-CG footage.

When asked how far along they are on prepping Alita, Cameron responded:

We're not that far down the line. We have a very good script and we've done a lot of production design. We've done about a year of production design and we've put together an art reel that shows the arc of the film.

From the sounds of it, we could actually see Alita some time in the next few years. It won't be as hugely ambitious a project as Avatar, and it'll be much easier to get things going since they already have the tech down.

Alita was about a cyborg who was rescued and repaired by a kindly scientist. She was found with no memories, and the series followed her as she tried to figure out her past. From that description alone, you can tell that this is something that Cameron would be interested in. (I also wouldn't be surprised if the Sarah Connor Chronicles folks used the Alita image above as the inspiration for their marketing campaign.)

[Source: MTV]