For better or worse, filmmaker James Cameron has decided to devote the remainder of his career to the Avatar franchise. The Terminator and Aliens director will release the third chapter, Fire and Ash, next month, and he has plans for at least two more sequels.
In 2009, Avatar broke box office records by grossing over $2 billion. Much to the surprise of many box office pundits, Avatar: The Way of Water did the same thing, but will the third time be a charm for Cameron?
If not, he's willing to walk away from the franchise...and the director won't be passing the reins to anyone else.
"I’ve been in 'Avatar' land for 20 years, actually 30 years, because I wrote it in 1995, but I wasn’t working continuously on it for those first ten years," Cameron told Matthew Belloni (via SFFGazette.com). "There was a brief flurry of interest in '95, and then everybody said, 'You’re out of your mind,' and I shelved it for ten years. And then we got serious in 2005."
"Yeah, absolutely. Sure," he said, addressing the possibility of Fire and Ash being where the Avatar story concludes. "If this is where it ends, cool. There is one open thread. I’ll write a book. I’ll answer everybody’s question[s]."
Pushed on whether he'd consider letting anyone continue the Avatar franchise, Cameron replied, "Absolutely not. Look, I have choices there. There are levels in which I [can] immerse. I don’t think there’d ever be a version where there’s another 'Avatar' movie that I didn’t produce closely."
Regardless of how Avatar: Fire and Ash fares at the box office next month, Cameron has "ten other projects" in the pipeline and may helm one of those next. Ghosts of Hiroshima has been named as a possibility by the trades, but the filmmaker isn't so sure.
"That one ['Ghosts'] just hit the headlines briefly because of the book announcement and trying to push the book to bestseller because the author is a friend of mine," he noted. "It doesn’t mean I’m not going to make the film, but I haven’t written the script, and it’s not slated, and I don’t even have a distribution partner on it. It’s a pretty vaporware project right now."
While the moment has likely passed for Cameron to return to the world of Alien or Terminator, a separate interview with Empire Magazine saw the prolific director give Noah Hawley's Alien: Earth his stamp of approval.
"I like it. I think they took a lot of the DNA from my movie, from [Ridley Scott‘s] movie. And a couple of things from some of the later movies, they’ve got a little bit of that crazy POV thing racing down the corridors from [David] Fincher‘s film. I think it’s good. It’s great creative recombinance in action, but with its own swerve, which is basically what I did. You gotta celebrate the new with the old."
You can hear more from Cameron in the player below.