James Cameron is one of the most popular names in Hollywood, and one of the most successful filmmakers of all time. His original script for The Terminator launched a multimedia franchise (despite being sold for one dollar). His Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgement Day are often regarded as some of the greatest sequels ever made. While everyone predicted Titanic would be a box office bomb, it went on to become the highest-grossing movie of all time, a record it held for 12 years until it was dethroned but another James Cameron movie, Avatar.
Avatar still stands as the highest-grossing movie worldwide with over $2.8 billion, a number that will likely climb higher with the film's 3D re-release planned for September 2022. Cameron is a director who can hold the distinct titles of directing the first movie with a $100 million budget (True Lies), directing two of the highest-grossing movies of all time, and the first director to have two $2 billion worldwide films.
While most directors tend to work rather frequently, Cameron has not directed a narrative feature film since Avatar in 2009, and his next film is the sequel Avatar: The Way of Water. That means it has been 13 years since audiences got to see a James Cameron movie, which beats his previous hiatus between Titanic and Avatar by one year. Despite the director only helming two narrative films in the last 25 years, he has certainly been hard at work. Not only has he been looking to continue his Pandora story, turning it into a massive saga, but he has also been an active producer and documentarian, developing state-of-the-art technology, and doing his part to make the world a better place. Here is what James Cameron has been up to since 2009.
Working On Four Avatar Sequels
Arguably the largest endeavor of Cameron's career, the director has been developing sequels to Avatar since the release of the first film. Cameron isn't just making one sequel, but planning four films which have been a massive undertaking spanning nearly a whole decade of work.
The original plan was that Cameron would direct three Avatar sequels back to back with release dates set for 2016, 2017, and 2018. However, the addition of a fourth sequel, and the necessity to develop new technology in order to film performance capture scenes underwater, a task that had never been accomplished before, led to significant delays. This allowed Cameron and the crew more time to work on the writing, preproduction, and visual effects for the film. Cameron estimated that it took four years to write the four Avatar sequel scripts with writers, and it took WETA a year and a half to develop the technology to film motion capture underwater. Filming on Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 officially started in 2017 and concluded three years later in 2020.
Avatar: The Way of Water is set for release on December 16, 2022, with Avatar 3 set for release on December 20, 2024. Avatar 4 and Avatar 5 have yet to begin filming but are scheduled for December 18, 2026, and December 22, 2028, respectively, yet Cameron has recently implied he might let someone direct those films.
James Cameron's Documentary Work
In the 12-year gap between Titanic and Avatar, Cameron directed two documentary feature films and produced multiple television ones and the filmmaker has also done the same since the release of Avatar.
Cameron has a prolific documentary career. In 2012 Cameron appeared as himself in three documentary television specials, Titanic: The Final Word with James Cameron, James Cameron: Voyage to the Bottom of the Earth, and A New Age of Exploration: National Geographic at 125. In 2014, Cameron and frequent collaborator Arnold Schwarzenegger executive produced the original Showtime documentary series Years of Living Dangerously focused on climate change and tackled issues of rising sea levels, deforrestation, and water scarceity to name a few, and featured a variety of guest hosts including Harrison Ford, Sigourney Weaver, and Barack Obama.
In 2018, he was the host of a six-part documentary series on A&E titled James Cameron's Story of Science Fiction where he interviewed famous science fiction figures like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Ridley Scott to name a few. Most recently he was the executive producer on the National Geographic and Disney+ series Secrets of Whales narrated by Aliens and Avatar star Sigourney Weaver.
James Cameron is an Active Producer
While Cameron has been busy working on Avatar: The Way of Water and its upcoming sequels, the director has also lent his clout to other projects. Most notably, he finally was able to get his long-in-development film Alita: Battle Angel released by hiring Robert Rodriguez to direct, and the duo collaborated on the script. Alita: Battle Angel was released on February 14, 2019, and was the final film released by 20th Century Fox as its own studio before becoming acquired by the Walt Disney Company. While it only grossed $85.8 million domestically, worldwide it brought in $405 million and ever since then fans have been hoping for a sequel. 2019 also saw Cameron return to the Terminator series, as he was a producer and writer on Terminator: Dark Fate.
In Hollywood, sometimes even a name like James Cameron isn't enough to get a movie off the ground. In 2010, shortly after Avatar was released and broke box office records, Cameron signed on as a producer on the Universal Pictures' adaptation of At The Mountain of Madness which would have been directed by Guillermo del Toro. The film was meant to be in 3D and Tom Cruise was considered for the lead role, however Universal Pictures pulled the plug on the movie in 2011 as the studio didn't want to invest a $200 million budget in an R-rated film, and it was reportedly too similar to Prometheus which was being developed at 20th Century Fox at the same time.
James Cameron's Environmental Activism
As seen in many of his films and documentaries, Cameron has strong beliefs about the nature of the planet and how humans treat it. In the years since Avatar, he has taken an active effort to speak out for global efforts to help combat climate change, including making documentary series like Years of Living Dangerously to inform the public.
In 2012, Cameron and his family adopted a vegan diet, as he and his wife have become advocates of plant food and called for planet-based meal plans and less focus on meat to help mitigate climate change (they even opened a vegan K-12 school). The same year, Cameron purchased more than 2,471 acres of land in remote South Wairarapa, New Zealand in which they grow a variety of organic fruit, nuts, and vegetables. In 2018 Cameron was the executive producer on The Game Changers, a documentary about athletes who have plant-based diets. Then in June 2019, Cameron announced a business venture with Lord of the Rings trilogy director Peter Jackson to produce plant-based meat, cheese, and dairy products in New Zealand. Cameron not only wants to make movies that change cinema, but also wants to do his part in saving the planet.