EXCLUSIVE: Deadline can reveal that Oscar-winning filmmaker James Cameron has purchased the rights to Charles Pellegrino‘s forthcoming book Ghosts of Hiroshima.
Cameron has committed to use that, and the 2015 Pellegrino book Last Train From Hiroshima, as the basis for a film he will shoot as soon as Avatar production permits. Cameron shared with Deadline that the two nonfiction books will be adapted into one “uncompromising theatrical film.” It will mark Cameron’s first non-Avatar film since 1997’s Oscar-winning Titanic.
The film will be called Last Train From Hiroshima. Pellegrino’s Ghosts of Hiroshima will be published by Blackstone Publishing in August 2025. That marks the 80th anniversary of the dropping of the bomb in 1945.
The film focuses in part on the true story of a Japanese man during World War II who survived the atomic blast at Hiroshima, got on a train to Nagasaki, and then survived the nuclear explosion in that city.
Both of Pellegrino’s books draw on the voices of bomb survivors and the new science of forensic archaeology. Pellegrino writes in detail the event and aftermath of two days in August 1945, when nuclear devices detonated over Japan changed life on Earth forever. At the narrative core of both books are eyewitness accounts of those who experienced the atomic explosions firsthand — the Japanese civilians on the ground and the American flyers in the air. The bombs are estimated to have killed between 150,000 and 246,000 people.
“It’s a subject that I’ve wanted to do a film about, that I’ve been wrestling with how to do it, over the years,” Cameron told Deadline. “I met Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a survivor of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just days before he died. He was in the hospital. He was handing the baton of his personal story to us, so I have to do it. I can’t turn away from it.” While visiting Yamaguchi, Cameron and Pellegrino pledged to “pass on his unique and harrowing experience to future generations.”
Cameron’s fear of nuclear war, featured in several of his iconic films including The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, has been on his mind since watching the Cuban Missile Crisis unfold when he was 8 years old.
The publishing deal for the Cameron project was made by Shane Salerno at The Story Factory, who also served as Cameron’s co-screenwriter on Avatar: The Way of Water along with Josh Friedman, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, as well as next year’s Avatar: Fire and Ash, and two additional Avatar sequels. Pellegrino, the author of more than 30 books, served as a science consultant to Cameron on Titanic and Avatar.
Blackstone CEO Josh Stanton said everyone at the imprint “is thrilled and honored to be the publisher of Ghosts of Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino, which will serve as part of the source material for James Cameron’s epic motion picture.”
Blackstone also published the audio book of Oppenheimer, which became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller.
What is interesting here is that when director Christopher Nolan was promoting Oppenheimer — which won seven Oscars including Best Director and Best Picture — he answered questions about not showing the bombs’ effects on Japan in his film by hoping that someone else will tell that part of the story in a film. Cameron wove an epic love story and class struggles as a way to tell the story of the tragic sinking of the Titanic, with groundbreaking visual effects that led to 11 Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director, and $2.26 billion gross in 1998. One can only imagine what the master filmmaker, who has directed three of the five biggest movies of all time, will come up with to tell this story he has long harbored.
Pellegrino is repped by Salerno’s The Story Factory, which will also be handling international rights sales on the new book. The Story Factory just scored its 32nd New York Times bestseller when T.J. Newman’s Worst Case Scenario hit the lists. The company also made the deal for Michael Mann’s Heat 2, which debuted as a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and is set at Warner Bros as Mann’s next film. The Story Factory also has two forthcoming Quentin Tarantino authorized “making of” series of books, on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Inglourious Basterds. The books are written by Jay Glennie, with Tarantino participating.
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