SOMETIMES THE ONLY PERSON YOU have to beat is yourself. Aside from a brief Avengers: Endgame-shaped blip, James Cameron’s films have spent the last quarter of a century topping the global box office charts. But where do you go after the awards-laden, cash-hoovering double-whammy of Titanic (1997) and Avatar (2009), a pair of movies that plundered cinematic unobtanium and redefined the concept of a blockbuster?
For the former “king of the world”, the answer lay on an alien moon in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri – after he’d taken a brief trip to the deepest ocean depths on Earth.
“You know, we wanted to do it again before the first Avatar ever came out,” Jon Landau, Cameron’s long-time producing partner, tells SFX. “We identified that there was more that we wanted to tell, but we needed a decompression period after the release of the movie.
“Also Jim had other ambitions, including going to the Mariana Trench, so it was after the 3D premiere of Titanic [in 2012] that Jim really sat down to put pen to paper on the ideas that he had for where he wanted to go.”
AVAT4R
As you’d expect of someone with the clout to defeat Thanos, Cameron has never been a man to do anything by halves. And so a director who’s made just two films since 1994’s True Lies – a release rate so leisurely it would leave even the late Stanley Kubrick looking on in awe – has now embarked on a four-part expedition to Pandora, starting with December’s The Way Of Water. In a Hollywood where long-running franchises have come to rule the big screen like never before, Cameron is about to unleash one of his own.
“[Early on], Jim had identified that he wanted to make three movies, and felt that he had a plethora of directions to go in those,” explains Landau. “Then, when he started working with teams of writers to take his 1,000-plus pages of notes and coalesce them into stories, he realised weto three movies, that there were really four unique stories to tell.”
