James Cameron's Biggest Issue With Marvel Movies Might Surprise You

Unless you've been living under a particularly soundproof rock, it's been hard to miss superhero movies having somewhat fallen out of favor with audiences and critics alike. Despite mounting a comeback of sorts with the one-two punch of "Thunderbolts*" and "The Fantastic Four: First Steps" this past year, it's not exactly a state secret that Marvel Studios has fallen on hard times lately. Heck, should the last major blockbusters perform as expected in the next few weeks, there's a chance that not a single film centered on a cape-wearing character will crack the top 10 highest-grossing movies of 2025 — for the first time in almost 15 years.

Everyone from Martin Scorsese to Steven Spielberg have discussed the decline of superhero movies and what this says about our pop culture trends at large, so why not throw James Cameron into the mix? The "Avatar" filmmaker is currently preoccupied with the impending release of "Fire and Ash," but that hasn't stopped him from adding his two cents on the most pressing debate currently raging these days ... though not as we might've expected. While making an appearance on Matt Belloni's "The Town" podcast, the director was asked why it seems like nobody has jumped on board the 3D bandwagon first pioneered by 2009's "Avatar." According to Cameron, this falls squarely on the 3D conversion trends — as opposed to actually filming in native 3D — popularized by Marvel movies:

"They're doing it with conversion. So, your Marvel films typically are released in 3D through conversion. It sucks, I know. And you had other top filmmakers [who] were experimenting with it, like Scorsese and Ang Lee and so on that actually authored in 3D. And the result is that their movies, like 'Prometheus' and "Life of Pi' and 'Hugo,' look spectacular."

Naturally, by heaping praise on the 3D filmmaking of the biggest directors around, James Cameron basically damns most Marvel Cinematic Universe movies through omission. Given there hasn't been a single Marvel movie where 3D actually felt vital and necessary since 2016's "Doctor Strange," it's difficult to dispute anything Cameron is saying here. To hear him tell it, however, that's only the tip of the iceberg. The larger issue has to do with the studio's overall thought process that feeds into this approach, where the perceived ease and efficiency of 3D conversion belies something much more concerning. As he put it:

"When the studio tells a production to shoot in 3D, [they believe] everything that goes wrong on the movie is 3D's fault. So, that [narrative] creates a sense, on the studio's part over a period of years, 'We're not going to mess with 3D, we're going to do conversion.' Now, the issue is that, in fact, conversion costs more money than the incremental cost of shooting 3D — which is not zero, but it might be two to four percent of your entire production budget. It's not a big deal, as opposed to cramming in a fast, bad conversion into your post schedule and spending five to eight million dollars doing that, just right out the window to a conversion house, to get a mediocre-to-bad result that the filmmaker has not put into their authoring."

According to Cameron, the prevailing motivation behind this happens to be exactly what's plagued many a Marvel movie. "The bigger picture is, that puts the studio in the control position, right?" he explained. "It just shifts control from the filmmaker to the studio. That's what it's all been about."

For all the studio machinations and internal politics involved with making a movie on the scale of the "Avatar" franchise, however, leave it to James Cameron to have his finger on the pulse of exactly why 3D hasn't experienced the full-scale revolution that many of us anticipated over 15 years ago. While there's plenty of blame to go around, perhaps the simplest explanation may be the best one: Most theaters simply aren't built for it. Elsewhere during his conversation with Matt Belloni on "The Town," Cameron offered up his theory on the "biggest limitation" that plagues 3D to this day:

"I think the biggest limitation on 3D has been light levels in the theater [...] You have 95% of theaters are [set at] inferior light levels — 95%, it's not a trivial number. So, you got a few premium screens and you can bet that, when we show ['Avatar'] to the press, and we show it to the critics and all that, we make sure the light levels are there."

While Cameron doesn't quite cite his sources on that figure, we're confident he's not too far off the mark. That may remind you of when theaters had to make hasty adjustments to accommodate for another technological fad with high frame rate (HFR) filmmaking, marketed for movies such as the "Hobbit" trilogy, "Gemini Man," and "Avatar: The Way of Water." But considering the prevalence of 3D, shouldn't this be another matter entirely? It's mind-boggling that we could make it this far into the new era of digital filmmaking, yet our theatrical infrastructure remains woefully ill-equipped to handle the demands of 3D. Hopefully, that continues to change when "Avatar: Fire and Ash" hits the big screen on December 19, 2025.