James Cameron Says He May Finally Move on from Avatar and Tell “Other Stories”
In a recent interview, the blockbuster filmmaker signaled he may be leaving Pandora behind.
James Cameron may finally be willing to give his blue aliens a rest. In a recent interview, the blockbuster director said that after working on the Avatar series for 21 years, he’s currently “looking around the landscape and saying, ‘What are the other stories I want to tell?’”
The filmmaker says he’s questioning which ideas he wants to direct versus write or produce going forward. Specifically, he recently mapped out his projects around the question “What will do the most good?” and considered “How’s that going to make the world better for my kids?” Cameron added that “you don’t want to be too didactic or shrill about things” in terms of a movie's themes and messaging, and that a film's success ultimately comes down to its characters. He hasn’t decided what he’s going to pursue next, and said he’s still in a “liminal state of mapping out the last act” of his career.
Shortly after last year's Avatar: Fire and Ash was released, Cameron began to signal that the previously planned fourth and fifth Avatar films weren't guaranteed. While Fire and Ash, which recently hit streaming, made an impressive $1.4 billion at the box office, this marked a significant drop-off from the first Avatar’s $2.7 billion and the second one’s $2.4 billion. The biggest problem, according to Cameron, is that these movies are “hideously expensive and take a long time” to make. He wants to “do them in half the time for two-thirds of the cost,” and said it would take up to a year to brainstorm how to do that.
Cameron is currently 71 years old and hasn’t directed a non-Avatar film since 1997's record-setting Titanic. Before that, he directed the first two Terminator movies, Aliens, The Abyss, True Lies, and more. While the Avatar series has made billions, many have long wished the director would apply his blockbuster filmmaking skills to something else. While we don’t know for sure whether Cameron's next project will be Avatar-related, between the tremendous cost of making these movies and the director's shifting priorities, it seems that it may finally come to pass.