Some moviegoers might not realize it, but there was a time when a new James Cameron film announcement was a full-blown cultural event—and not just because he’s the filmmaker behind three of the highest-grossing movies of all time. There was also a time when his next big project wasn’t another installment of the Avatar franchise. But after nearly two decades spent building and expanding the world of Pandora, Cameron is ready to look past the blue aliens. As he recently put it: “I’m now starting to dig my way through.”
In a conversation with Deadline, the director revealed he’s actively transitioning from his all-consuming Avatar franchise to begin work on a long-gestating, emotionally searing project, the book-to-screen adaptation of Ghosts of Hiroshima. This dramatic shift in focus marks a new chapter for the visionary behind Titanic and The Terminator. As the director tells it:
Avatar has taken over my life as a filmmaker and I’m now starting to dig my way through that and figure out a future that embraces not only completing the Avatar saga, but also being able to do some of these other projects that are near and dear to me.
According to the report, the True Lies filmmaker is not stepping away from Avatar entirely; Avatar 3 is still slated on the 2025 movie schedule, and he has scripts and designs ready for a fourth and fifth installment. But after making a deathbed promise to a Hiroshima bombing survivor, Cameron says it’s time to fulfill a deeper creative obligation. He continued:
I want to do for what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what Steven Spielberg did with the Holocaust and D-Day with Saving Private Ryan. He showed it the way it happened.
Based on the upcoming nonfiction book Ghosts of Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino, dropping August 5 to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the bombings, Cameron’s next feature aims to depict the nuclear devastation not through political debate, but through human suffering. The film will draw heavily from survivor testimony, including that of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only known person to survive both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts. Yamaguchi, who died shortly after meeting with Cameron and Pellegrino in the late 2000s, gifted the filmmaker a painting and his blessing to tell the story.
The premise is haunting: A moment-by-moment retelling of the atomic attacks through the eyes of those who lived through them. Cameron won’t shy away from the horror of the event. He expounded on what he learned from talking to Spielberg:
He [Spielberg] and I talked about this, and he shared this with me. When he was making that film, notwithstanding whatever the studio wanted from it, he said, I’m going to make it as intense as I can make it, because my limitation as any filmmaker — and he’s the best out there — is that I can’t make it as intense as it really was. You’ve got to use everything at your cinematic disposal to show people what happened. We all love our horror movies, and horror movies love to outdo each other. This is true horror, because it happened.
This project has been years in the making for James Cameron. He’s studied nuclear warfare since childhood and has explored its horrors throughout his career, most memorably in Terminator 2, one of the greatest sci-fi films ever made and one of Cameron's best movies. Now, he believes the world needs a cultural reminder of what these weapons truly do.
There is no word on whether Cameron will direct beyond Avatar 3 or leave that for another filmmaker, but it seems he’s ready to move on to something a bit more grounded. Still, we fans of Pandora have Avatar: Fire and Ash to look forward to as it is set to hit theaters later this year, on December 19.
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