James Cameron – Titanic, Avatar and Beyond
Released to theaters on December 19, 1997, Titanic grossed less in its first weekend ($28.6 million) than in its second, ($35.4 million), an increase of 23.8%. This is unheard of for a widely released film, which is a testament to the movie’s word of mouth appeal. This was especially noteworthy, considering that the film’s running time of more than three hours limited the number of showings each theater could schedule. It held the No. 1 spot on the box-office charts for months, eventually grossing a total of over $600 million in the United States and Canada and more than $1.8 billion worldwide. Titanic became the highest-grossing film ever made, until Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar. Despite criticism during production of the film, it received a record-tying 14 Oscar nominations, and won 11, including Best Picture and Best Director award for Cameron.Upon receiving the award, Cameron exclaimed, “I’m king of the world!” in reference to one of the main characters’ lines from the film. Titanic was re-released in 3D in April 2012, in order to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the actual ship.
Cameron had initially next planned to do a film of the comic book character Spider-Man, Columbia hired David Koepp to adapt Cameron’s treatment into a screenplay. Koepp’s first draft is taken often word-for-word from Cameron’s story, though later drafts were heavily rewritten by Koepp himself, Scott Rosenberg, and Alvin Sargent. In its release in 2002, Spider-Man had its screenplay credited solely to Koepp.
Unable to make Spider-Man, Cameron moved to television and created Dark Angel. In 1998 James and John David Cameron formed a digital media company, earthship.tv which became Earthship Productions. The company produced live multimedia documentaries from the depths of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. With Earthship Productions, John Cameron’s recent projects have included undersea documentaries on the Bismark (Expedition: Bismark, 2002) and the Titanic (Ghosts of the Abyss, 2003, in IMAX 3D) and Tony Robinson’s Titanic Adventure (2005). He was also a producer on the 2002 film Solaris, and narrated The Exodus Decoded.
Cameron is a leading advocate for stereoscopic digital 3-D films, and was the founder and CEO of Digital Domain, a visual effects production and technology company. In June 2005, Cameron was announced to be working on a project tentatively titled “Project 880” (now known to be Avatar) in parallel with another project, Battle Angel (an adaptation of the manga series Battle Angel Alita), both to be shot in 3D.
Avatar had an estimated budget of over $300 million and was released on December 18, 2009. It is composed almost entirely of computer-generated animation, using a more advanced version of the “performance capture” technique used to bring Golum to life in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Cameron explained that the delay in producing the film since the 1990s had been to wait until the technology necessary to create his project was advanced enough. The film was originally scheduled to be released in May 2009 but was pushed back to December 2009 to allow more time for post production on the complex CGI and to give more time for theatres worldwide to install 3D projectors. The world mocked, and awaited a massive financial failure.
The film went on to break the record for highest-grossing film ever, beating Cameron’s previous film Titanic. Avatar also became the first movie to ever earn more than $2 billion worldwide. It was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won three for Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects and Best Art Direction. Cameron lost the award for Best Director to his ex-wife, Kathryn Bigelow, who also took Best Picture with her film The Hurt Locker.
Most recently, James Cameron served as the executive producer of Sanctum, a $30,000,000 (estimated budget) film detailing the expedition of a team of underwater cave divers who find themselves trapped in a cave.
James Cameron went out to film a documentary that’s later going to be released as 3-D, about the “Mariana Trench”. The deepest place on earth. His the first human being to do it since 1960’s where a team of two, went down but never got any material proof on it. Cameron went down with one of his 7 year project, a special designed sub (The “Deepsea Challenger”), that’s designed to withstand the pressure given by 32,000 ft below the ocean surface. He made this dive in March 2012.
In October 2010, Cameron signed an agreement with Fox to direct two sequels to Avatar, which are scheduled to be released in December 2014 and December 2015. Another project Cameron has announced is a personal commitment to shoot a film on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as told through the story of Tsutomi Yamaguchi, a man who survived both attacks. Cameron met with Yamaguchi just days before he died in 2010.
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