Avatar without James Cameron feels impossible, unless this one director replaces him |
Avatar: Fire and Ash left me thinking about Shakespeare. Not because James Cameron’s dialogue is up there with the Bard’s (sorry, Spider), but because it was full of the same harrowing drama as Hamnet, the least obvious Avatar comp of 2025.
An adaptation of one of the most beloved books of the decade, and now one of the year’s big Oscar contenders, Hamnet could not look any more different from Fire and Ash. Working with novelist Maggie O'Farrell, director Chloé Zhao charts how a couple’s loss blossoms into Shakespeare’s masterwork, Hamlet. Meanwhile, Fire and Ash is a fantastical sci-fi threequel full of talking whales and dragon-vs.-helicopter battles.
But in reaching for that spark of human truth, two directors found themselves in the same lane, and I’m now convinced the only person who could possibly take over for Big Jim, if the 71-year-old director moves on from Avatar 4, is Zhao. At the very least, a need for a series successor sounds likelier than it did a few years ago.
The existence of Avatar and its sequels looks more and more like a miracle as the Hollywood blockbuster machine calcifies into a low-risk, IP-driven operation. Cameron is one of a kind in the annals of movie history. He came up as a visual-driven special effects artist with a knack of action screenplays (as a writer only he's credited for Piranha II: The Spawning and Rambo: First Blood Part II). As the filmmaker proved himself financially viable to movie studios with hits like The Terminator, Aliens, and True Lies, his blank check stock rose to a point where he could march into 20th Century Fox with a pitch like “Romeo and Juliet but on the Titanic” and get a $120 million budget (which he would then proceed to blow and go over).
But Cameron has always delivered, no matter how much money he’s burnt on R&D, the production woes, the skeptical press predicting his eventual bombing out, or his follies diving to the bottom of the ocean as an amateur marine biologist. Even after dedicating a third of his life to the passion project of Avatar, he’s come out on top. Who else in the movie business has been allowed to go build a warehouse-sized wave tank in order to properly motion-capture ocean plunges? Not even Spielberg and Scorsese have that cred.
Unlike even George Lucas, one of the rare creatives to birth an entire fictional universe straight to screen, every dimension of James Cameron’s personality seems to have been amalgamated into what we see in the Avatar films. Lucas flooded Star Wars with his nostalgia of old serials. Cameron unloaded his complete psychology: There’s the science fiction/futurist perspective in the franchise’s setting, the fascination with nature and ocean life in the biomes of Pandora, the fetishtic appreciation of military tech (that he frankly shares with Hayao Miyazaki) in the RDA’s war machines, his own struggles with fatherhood playing out in the Jake Sully storyline, his career as an innovator in the effects space pushing CG physics realism in every corner of the making-of process, and probably a little sex stuff in there too, let’s be honest. It’s 100% the vision of one guy, despite........