After “Titanic” and “Avatar”, James Cameron continues to explode the box office with “Avatar : The Way of the Water”. However, the filmmaker’s career could have been less glorious. This is what a producer imagined who had warned the filmmaker against a film and predicted the end of his career.
James Cameron, king of the box office
If we look today at the career of james cameron, hard to find much to complain about. It is an understatement to say that the director has had great success. If only by taking Titanic (1997) and Avatar (2009), we obtained two of the three biggest boxes of the world box office (with Avatar in first place).
And whileHASvatar: The Way of Water was released on December 14, 2022, it would not be surprising to see its rankings shake up again in the coming weeks. To date, the film has already garnered more than 1.4 billion dollars in revenue worldwide!
Based on revenue alone, the filmmaker’s other films have been vastly inferior. But you have to take into account first that some of his other productions weren’t as mainstream. Then, that the budgets were not the same, without forgetting the time and inflation. Thereby, the success of his other films remains impressive.
terminator (1984) and its $6.4 million budget grossed over $75 million, whileAliens, the return (1986) pocketed $131 million for an estimated budget of $18.5 million. Terminator 2 (1991) rose almost to 520 million dollars in revenue worldwide for a budget of 102 million, and True Lies (1994), with an almost equivalent budget, brought in nearly $380 million. Finally, there is onlyAbyss (1989) which is “a bit spotty” on this table, since with a budget of almost 50 million dollars, it only reached 90 million at the worldwide box office.
End of career because ofAliens
However, the career of James Cameron could have taken another turn. At least that’s what predicted a producer when the filmmaker wanted to embark on Aliens. The director told this anecdote during an interview with film personalities, organized by Empire. It was Edgar Wright who asked him if he had had any fears when tackling the continuation ofAlien (1978). But if he was certain of his decision, it was therefore this producer whom he did not name who warned him.
In fact, the “brand” Alien was already important thanks to the success of Ridley Scott’s film. Therefore, making the sequel could in no way be beneficial and even had a good chance of end the career of James Cameron.
When I started working on Aliens, I had lunch with a fat producer who said, “You’re not going to get anything out of it. If your movie is good, all credit goes to Ridley. If it’s bad, you will be the only responsible. And it will be the end of your career”. I answered: “Yes, maiiiiiiiiis… I like it”. I may have been a silly fanboy, but I could picture the movie so clearly in my head that I had to.
The dollar in the title
Suffice to say that one of the two had a fine nose, since James Cameron directed one of the most popular films in the franchise Alien, and was able to have the career that we know him. Finally, in addition to this discussion, the filmmaker confirmed another anecdote around from the title of the film. It was during a meeting with the bosses of Fox. The filmmaker flipped his script and on a blank page wrote ALIEN, then drew an S at the end, before adding two lines to make it the dollar sign ($).
Maybe it was Pavlovian conditioning when they saw the $ sign closely related to the word “Alien”. Or maybe it was the confidence I was projecting. But they said yes.
