It’s easy to forget, since he’s gone on to become one of the most lucrative, successful, and large-scale filmmakers of all time, but James Cameron is a horror filmmaker, through and through. The man’s introduction to audiences was supposed to be Piranha II: The Spawning, before he unceremoniously parted ways with that project amid creative disputes. He followed up that misshapen effort with a much more concentrated one, in the form of The Terminator, which subsequently bought his ticket to make Aliens a few short years later.
While both of these early-career classics from Cameron are easily recognizable as horror films (The Terminator is a techno-age sci-fi slasher, and Aliens is not only building off of Ridley Scott’s original film and its claustrophobic horror but also going bigger and bringing in other atomic-age horror influences like Gordon Douglas’ Them!), the filmmaker would go on to graduate to much more wide-scale, big-budget productions within other genres.
This all culminated with his commitment to his Avatar franchise, in which he has been actively working since the early ‘00s. Previously, Cameron had remained adamant that there were plans for (at least) two more Avatar sequels. Now, however, the filmmaker seems to be walking back those claims and hinting that something different may be on the horizon.
In a recent interview, Cameron said with regard to the future of his filmmaking career, “I haven't made any decisions yet. I'm still in this liminal state of mapping out, you know, kind of the last act…” While that isn’t necessarily explicit confirmation that the director is entirely stepping away from Avatar, it also doesn’t sound nearly as certain about the fact that audiences will one day see the fourth and fifth Avatar films that Cameron has long spoken of.
Following the record-shattering success of Avatar in 2009, rather than pushing forward with a single sequel, Cameron opted to assemble a writers’ room of creative talent and plan out an entire franchise off the back of the first film. The resulting gestational period took longer than Cameron or audiences anticipated but paid off in spades.
When the second film, Avatar: The Way of Water, was finally released in 2022, it was a gargantuan hit in every conceivable way. A mere three years later, the third film, Avatar: Fire and Ash, was released to similar success across the board. However, the third film did notably make slightly less than the prior two (only one-and-a-half billion dollars). For some reason, this threw things into a state of flux at parent company Disney, with executives insisting that the planned final two films needed to be made faster, cheaper, and shorter.
Initially, Cameron spoke about how he was excited to tackle these perplexing challenges head-on. But now, just a few months later, it sounds as if Cameron is far less certain about such a prospect. It’s worth noting that Avatar: Fire and Ash did bizarrely rush to a final image that could be seen as wrapping up the entire series, despite leaving many narrative threads dangling in the wind. At the time of the film’s release, Cameron spoke about how that final image summed up his creative intent with the franchise in many ways, and now, it looks as though it may be its true culmination.
James Cameron is certainly not a young man, but he continues to make inspiring and innovative art. I would love to see what he has cooked up for further Avatar films, but I would also love a few more original works from the man before it’s too late. Here’s hoping that if Cameron is moving on, he gives audiences one more nightmare-inducing horror film before it's all said and done.
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