James Cameron 'Mourns' The Movies He Won't Make Because Of Avatar
As long ago as 2006, James Cameron announced that if his then-upcoming film "Avatar" was a hit, he would shift his entire career toward making sequels to it. Weirdly, Cameron was inspired by director Gore Verbinski, who, at the time, had just made two enormously expensive "Pirates of the Caribbean" sequels back-to-back. It seems that anything Verbinski could do, Cameron was determined to do better. When "Avatar" opened in 2009, and swiftly became the most successful movie of all time, the writing was on the wall: Cameron was officially in the "Avatar" business in perpetuity. Any of Cameron's other planned projects were put on hold. His manga adaptation, "Alita: Battle Angel," was passed to Robert Rodriguez.
Cameron waited 13 years to make the first "Avatar" sequel, "Avatar: The Way of Water," as he was famously biding his time for VFX technology to catch up with the undersea visuals he wanted to create. However the reader feels about "Water," one cannot deny that it's visually dazzling and the effects are some of the best Cameron has yet produced. As of this writing, shooting for a third "Avatar" film has already been completed. In October of 2022, Cameron announced that the shooting of a fourth "Avatar" was well underway. A fifth "Avatar" is in the works.
With Cameron making "Avatar" sequels exclusively, some lament that the filmmaker will no longer focus any of his attention on different, new, creative projects. One such fan is director S.S. Rajamouli who made the hit film "RRR." In a recent interview with Empire, Rajamouli asked Cameron about what he won't be making in the future, and Cameron did express a note of mourning. More "Avatar" films meant, Cameron knew, less of anything else.
The world is big enough
One of the reasons Cameron has decided to spend the rest of his filmmaking career on Pandora is that he's fond of the paradise he created. He has spent all his creative efforts since the mid-2000s inventing the flora and fauna of a distant alien world, not to mention the bizarre future technologies that the infiltrating human forces use. While some technical details of the "Avatar" movies haven't yet been revealed — how long, for instance, is Pandora's day/night cycle? — Cameron has clearly thought them out and written them in a "series bible" of sorts. In Cameron's mind, the world of "Avatar" is even more vast and complicated than what audiences have seen. For the director, that seems to be enough. To Rajamouli, Cameron said:
"Two thoughts in answer to your question: the first is that the world of 'Avatar' is so sprawling that I can tell most of the stories I want to tell within it and try many of the stylistic techniques that I hope to explore."
It may be wise to let Cameron follow his heart. Despite taking 13 years to make, "Avatar: The Way of Water" managed to dazzle audiences anew with its underwater motion capture filming and ambitious digital vistas. Like the original, it is one of the biggest movies of all time. Indeed, of the top five highest-grossing films in cinema history, Cameron has directed three of them. If Pandora is as complicated as Cameron seems to imply that it is, then there will surely be no lack of material. The only thing one might say for sure is that all the future "Avatar" movies will be blunt but well-meaning anti-colonialist narratives.
Collaboration
As for the non-"Avatar" fails Cameron will never make, the filmmaker admits to feeling a bit of a pang. Cameron is 68, and he knows he only has so much time left on this planet. He comforts himself, however, by remembering that other filmmakers are sometimes willing to collaborate with him. On at least two notable occasions, other talented directors made ideas of his into feature films, and Cameron was proud of the results. There was the aforementioned "Alita," and there was Kathryn Bigelow's 1995 sci-fi film "Strange Days," which Cameron co-wrote.
"And secondly, yes ... our time as artists is finite. I will always mourn some of the stories that I don't get to make. But I feel a great satisfaction when other directors want to explore some of my ideas, like Kathryn Bigelow did with 'Strange Days,' and Robert Rodriguez did when I passed him the baton on 'Alita: Battle Angel'. I look forward to more collaborations in the future with directors I admire."
Cameron is busy with "Avatar" movies, so he hasn't announced any other ideas or collaborations. He was, at the very least, seemingly announcing that he was open to such things. He is also an incredibly busy filmmaker, and seems to enjoy pushing his limits, so it's entirely possible that, in between shooting scenes for future "Avatar" movies, he is quietly working on other ambitious film projects. Cameron may be living on Pandora as a director, but as a screenwriter, he's still on Earth.