The Real Reason James Cameron Spent The Last Two Decades Only On Avatar

For fans of director James Cameron's earlier movies like "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," "Aliens," or "Titanic," it's hard not to be frustrated by Cameron's later-career filmography. After "Titanic" was released in 1997, Cameron has only released two movies since: "Avatar" in 2009 and "Avatar: Way of Water" in 2022. The third movie in the franchise, "Avatar: Fire & Ash," is set to release in December this year, with two more "Avatar" sequels after that. 

In other words, Cameron has spent most of the past 25 years focused entirely on "Avatar," which is a problem for viewers who don't think the "Avatar" movies are all that good. If you think the franchise is all style and no substance, if you think the movies are too long and the characters too archetypal, it's easy to see why you might echo the common talking point that Cameron is "wasting his life" by dedicating so much of it to his blue alien movies. 

But Cameron himself doesn't think of it that way. He's enjoyed making these "Avatar" movies not just because these are stories he wants to tell, but because he thinks they're bringing some good into the world. As he explained in a recent interview with Variety:

"I've justified making 'Avatar' movies to myself for the last 20 years, not based on how much money we made, but on the basis that hopefully it can do some good. It can help connect us. It can help connect us to our lost aspect of ourself that connects with nature and respects nature and all those things. ... Do I think that movies are the answer to our human problems? No, I think they're limited because people sometimes just want entertainment and they don't want to be challenged in that way. I think 'Avatar' is a Trojan horse strategy that gets you into a piece of entertainment, but then works on your brain and your heart a little bit in a way."

Cameron has backed up this do-good attitude by teaming up his "Avatar" marketing team with environmental charities. In the build-up to "The Way of Water," the "Avatar" website featured a page for fans to donate to The Nature Conservancy, a non-profit aimed at protecting ocean habitats and marine wildlife. Combine that with how both "Avatar" movies are basically 3-hour subliminal PSAs for recycling, and it's easy to see his point. 

While some cynics may roll their eyes at the idea of a movie doing any kind of tangible good in the world, the "Avatar" series is unique in how much it advocates for protecting the environment and fighting back against those who do it harm. The movie presents most of its human characters as coldhearted oil drillers destroying a beautiful alien paradise for their own corporate gain; the movie's solution to dealing with these corporate ghouls is not to compromise with them or change their minds, but to have the Na'vi straight-up murder them in some of the coolest action sequences of the 21st century so far. 

"Avatar" gets its largely American audience to cheer on the violent deaths of people who represent the height of American greed and cruelty. The fact that it did that and broke box office records in the process was pretty impressive. Movies with politics like this are not typically supposed to make $2.9 billion at the worldwide box office, but Cameron made it happen anyway. 

When the first "Avatar" movie was released in 2009, climate change was arguably at its height of prominence as a cultural issue. This was in a post-"Inconvenient Truth" world, one where even the Republican presidential candidate in 2008 was acknowledging that climate change existed and proposing plans to combat it. But throughout the 2010s, as Republicans turned to their climate change-denying status quo, climate change activism sort of faded into the background. Presidential debates were notably sparse on any climate-related questions, nor did voters tend to rank it high on their list of most pressing issues. 

Even though climate change had become an even more urgent issue throughout the 2010s, its cultural prominence in those "Avatar"-less years seemed oddly muted compared to the previous decade. This seems to be less the result of people not believing in the problem, so much as an overwhelming sense of helplessness people feel when thinking about it. Will the recent return of the hopeful, defiantly environmentalist "Avatar" franchise help change this trend? For the sake of our declining coral reefs, we certainly hope so.