James Cameron has told Entertainment Weekly that he is moving forward with his plans to make a film out of Yukito Kishiro's Battle Angel Alita (published in the U.S. by Viz), but he plans to make another film (the highly secret Project 880) first.  Cameron now plans to try and get Project 880 finished and into theaters in 2007, though he wouldn't rule out releasing it in 2008.  That means that Battle Angel Alita is now slated for 2009.

The good news for Battle Angel Alita fans is that both films are set up at Twentieth Century Fox and Cameron told EW: 'We couldn't do one unless we do both, they use the same technology.'   The bad news is that Cameron is notoriously slow -- he has made only 3 documentaries in the nine years since the release of Titanic -- and he will be filming both Project 880 and Battle Angel Alita in a hi-def 3-D format.  Cameron told EW that he hopes that at least 1,000 theaters will be able to show Project 880 digitally (to be effective the hi-def 3D process really requires digital presentation), but the pace of conversion to digital projection in American theaters is positively glacial.  This could provide another source of frustration for Cameron, who wants to keep pushing the American cinema to the frontier of technological innovation.