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After directing the highest-grossing film trilogy of all time, and having spent more than two decades bending technology, studio executives and several hundred million dollars’ worth of underwater motion capture to his will, James Cameron this week signalled that he may be ready to hand the future of the Avatar franchise to another director. Indeed, he bent Hollywood to his will so completely that it became almost impossible in the early 2010s to watch a blockbuster without uncomfortable plastic glasses, and without objects on the screen being hurled pointlessly towards the audience. Still, the Canadian film-maker now appears to be seriously considering handing over everyone’s favourite multibillion-dollar bioluminescent space jungle to someone else.
“There’s been momentum in the Avatar universe for 21 years at this point because we started in 2005,” Cameron told Denise Donlon in an interview for Canada’s governor general’s performing arts awards. “It’s been kind of an unbroken continuum. So this is the point where I’m looking at the landscape and asking, ‘What are the other stories I want to tell? How many of them do I need to direct myself versus writing and/or producing with other film-makers?’”
He added: “I haven’t made any decisions yet. I’m still in this liminal state of mapping out, you know, kind of the last act. And I don’t know if that last act will last a year or 20 years.”
This is not the first time Cameron has threatened to abandon his plans for Avatar. When he floated the possibility in 2022, I noted in this column that, at the rate the sequels were then progressing, he would be 106 by the time Avatar 5 reached cinemas and might require his own consciousness to be uploaded into a Na’vi. Yet only two years later, he insisted that anyone hoping to prise the next two films from his hands would have to run him over with a bus. It is therefore something of a surprise to find him once again contemplating life beyond Pandora.
Part of the problem is that Cameron’s record of handing cherished projects to other directors (while remaining aboard as producer) is decidedly mixed. Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995), which Cameron conceived, co-wrote and produced, became a cult classic rather than a hit. Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris (2002), produced by Cameron, turned cosmic mystery into two hours of George Clooney staring mournfully at a space station. Robert Rodriguez’s Alita: Battle Angel (2019), developed for years as a potential project for Cameron to direct, made respectable money but failed to turn enormous eyes and cyborg rollerball into the beginning of a global religion.
Then came Terminator: Dark Fate (2019), on which Cameron served as producer and story godfather while Tim Miller directed, only for the franchise to discover that resurrecting Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger and most of the plot of the original Terminator was not enough to persuade audiences that a sixth attempt to keep humanity out of the clutches of killer robots from the future was required. Cameron later described the edit as a “bloodbath” of creative battles, while Miller, the director of Deadpool, said the experience had left him with no desire ever to work with his famously exacting producer again.
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Yet there is an argument that Avatar may benefit from a new guiding hand. Last year’s Avatar: Fire and Ash recycled enough of its predecessors’ story beats to suggest that Pandora’s supply of unexplored territory may be running low. It still made almost $1.5bn worldwide, but disappeared into the cultural undergrowth with all the stealth of a 9ft fluorescent cat person. There was a distinct sense that this once most innovative of film franchises had become the cinematic equivalent of Oasis circa Be Here Now. Here was a product still vast, lavish and unmistakably itself, but now expending previously unimaginable quantities of money and effort to sell the memory of a past revolution rather than start a new one.
Cameron may not exactly have run out of ideas, but there’s only so far one man can travel when his entire dramatic toolkit consists of 9ft blue cat aliens riding space dragons and discussing the spiritual properties of trees. Tolkien himself might have struggled when faced with the prospect of Quaritch returning from the dead for the umpteenth time, and the Sully family discovering yet another previously unmentioned branch of Na’vi society with its own accent, ceremonial headwear and highly specialised mode of transport.
Perhaps we should simply let Cameron get on with something else for a change. After everything he has done for genre film-making over almost half a century, he has surely earned the right to make at least one film without Sigourney Weaver returning as the teenage daughter of her own dead mum, or without anybody having to learn how to hold their breath for seven minutes. At some point, even Pandora may need somebody new to decide what all its phosphorescent magnificence is actually for.
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