avatar_121613.jpg20th Century FOX

Avatar fans get excited -- James Cameron has just announced he will be making three sequels to his 2009 sci-fi blockbuster film Avatar. The first sequel is set to be released in 2016, and the other films are slated to be released in 2017 and 2018. We are so excited we're seeing blue!

The legendary director made the announcement about the future of the films, which will be shot in New Zealand, at a press conference in Wellington, alongside New Zealand's Prime Minister John Key on Monday.

Cameron said at the press conference, "It's quite a thrill to be officially saying that we're bringing the Avatar films to New Zealand. We had such a wonderful experience here making the first film."

The 2009 film, which starred Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana and Sigourney Weaver, won three Academy Awards and was the highest-grossing film in history, making a whopping $2.7billion worldwide.

Avatar was heralded for its groundbreaking technology -- and Cameron has said that the new sequels will be no different. A core team has been developing new software for the sequels, said Cameron, saying: "It's going to be a lot of new imagery and a lot of new environments and creatures across Pandora."

"We're blowing it out all over the place. At first I thought I was going to take it onto other worlds as well, in the same solar system, but it turned out not to be necessary. I mean the Pandora that we have imagined will be a fantasy land that is going to occupy people for decades to come, the way I see it," added Cameron.

Cameron said that while the first film surrounded Jake Sully (Worthington), the sequels will delve into different Na'vi cultures and also focus on more of the creatures inhabiting Pandora. 

The 59-year-old director said, "There's a fair bit of underwater stuff. It's been inaccurately said that the second film takes place underwater. That's not true."

"There are underwater scenes and surface-water scenes having to do with indigenous ocean cultures that are distributed across the three films."

Sounds exciting to us! 2016 can't come soon enough!