James Cameron Angrily Responds To People Questioning Why He's Spent So Many Years Working On 'Avatar': "Stay The [Expletive] Out Of It"
James Cameron is showing a different side to himself, a seemingly very bitter and angry side, while promoting his upcoming Avatar: Fire & Ash film.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, it was mentioned that a headline trended on Reddit asking, “Anyone else feel like it’s an unfortunate waste of talent that James Cameron will [spend] 35+ years on Avatar?”
Cameron reacted telling the outlet, “I’m feeling fulfilled as an artist, and when [those critical fans] become filmmakers, they can make those types of decisions for themselves — or just stay the [expletive] out of it.”
“It’s my decision, not yours,” he added. “It’s like saying, ‘Gee, I wish she wasn’t married to the same guy for so long.’ It’s none of your business.”
Ironically, after lashing out in seemingly bitterness and regret, Cameron appeared to agree with the implication by sharing he’s going to be moving on from exclusively working on Avatar:
“I’ve got other stories to tell, and I’ve got other stories to tell within Avatar. What won’t happen is, I won’t go down the rabbit hole of exclusively making only Avatar for multiple years. I’m going to figure out another way that involves more collaboration. I’m not saying I’m going to step away as a director, but I’m going to pull back from being as hands-on with every tiny aspect of the process.”
As for what he will work on next, it’s unclear. In the past, he’s discussed working on a number of projects including an adaptation of Ghosts of Hiroshima, another Terminator film, and an adaptation of Joe Abercrombie’s The Devils.
Cameron also said just a month ago that he swore a blood oath with Robert Rodriguez to make a second Alita: Battle Angel film, “Robert Rodriguez and I have sworn a blood oath to do at least one more Alita movie. In fact, we’re thinking of an architecture that bridges to a third film, but we’ll be satisfied if we can make one more. And we’re making progress on that.”
He did indicate that he plans to work on the next Terminator script, “Once the dust clears on Avatar in a couple of months, I’m going to really plunge into that. There are a lot of narrative problems to solve. The biggest is how do I stay enough ahead of what’s really happening to make it science fiction?”
The defensivness here is telling. Cameron built a career on pushing tech boundaries, but even Terminator got old fast when it stopped evolving the core ideas. Avatar's visual flex doesn't compensate for teh lack of deeper narrative progression across sequels. I worked on VFX pipelines back in the day and saw how obsession with a single IP can trap even legendary directors. If he's admitting he won't "go down therabbit hole" anymore, maybe the 13 years between Avatar 1 and 2 taught him what fans already knew. Real innovation means knowing when to pivot.
He has made some decent movies over the year, but Cameron just needs to accept that Avatar was a narrative blind alley that he for inexplicable reasons spent decades on.
Literally nobody looks at Avatar and says “Oh wow! Now THAT is a masterpiece!” Like they did with Terminator 1&2.