and Zoe Saldana becomes the first actor to appear in 4, $2B movies. (Avatar I & II, Avengers Infinity War/Endgame). The residuals must be nice .
Cameron is the only director period - living or dead - to have achieved that. It's not like Kubrick racked up a buncha $2 billion movies.
And Steven Spielberg is the only director alive with at least 3 of the US top 20 grossing films or 4 of the top 25 (adjusted for inflation.) Cameron has 2. I'd be very curious what the numbers would be if they brought in international receipts.
Which makes me wonder, if he had won the rights to Jurassic Park and actually made his Spider-Man movie would he break the trend? We'll never know.
How could James Cameron have "won the rights to Jurassic Park"? That's news to me. As far as I know, Spielberg was the first person that writer Michael Crichton called when he was writing the novel. I have read the 1993-1996 James Cameron "scriptments" of Spiderman, and I'm glad they never got made. They would have been terrible, terrible movies: https://www.liceoasproni.it/laboratory/scripts/Spiderman.pdf I'm not seeing much Spielberg on this list: True, Jurassic World was executive-produced by Spielberg, and it might even be an Amblin production, but the actual director was Colin Trevorrow. I'm the first to say that just because a movie made a lot of money doesn't make it objectively good, and I bet 100 years from now, when they're writing books about the history of Hollywood filmmaking, Spielberg will rank higher than Cameron in terms of being more versatile and tackling more challenging material. I think Spielberg is a much better director overall (though I'm on record as not liking The Fabelmans). Hey, who knew Frozen II got so high on this list? I think that's the only film I haven't seen on it. Fascinating how it's all superhero movies, sequels, animation, or action/blockbuster epics.
I forgot to post it here, but instead posted my review somewhere elsewhere (in a thread I can't find)... So we went back to see Avatar: The Way of Water again over the weekend, this time in IMAX 4K 3D HDR HFR, over at AMC Theater #1 at The Grove in the Beverly Grove area of West LA. Sound and picture quality were exemplary (it's a brand-new installation). Some thoughts <MINOR SPOILERS BELOW!>: • Jake Sully and his kids (and wife) are using wireless throat walkie talkies throughout the movie -- and it's a major plot point, because they can't communicate long distances any other way. How do they charge the batteries? [this is a big problem on movie sets] • particularly in the last hour of the movie, Jake and the family are shooting a ****load of bullets. Where do they get more ammunition? [don't tell me they're stealing it all from the dead guys they're fighting. Too many clips, too many magazines, lots of automatic weapon fire.] • [a bit of a spoiler] Why did they call the human technicians to arrive by helicopter to take care of injured Kiri when they knew they could be tracked? [and of course, this mistake leads to the entire end confrontation] • what happened to Edie Falco's character? She's basically the Big Bad of the entire movie, the head commander from Earth in charge of the force trying to crush the Nav'i. <spoiler> The big enemy ship sinks at the end [strong echos of Titanic], but we never see her. • there's way, way, way too many incidents of "the kids run off on their own, get caught by the bad guys, get threatened, then manage to escape again... only to get captured again by the bad guys 10 minutes later." I swear, this happens at least 3-4 times. • Didn’t Spider the kid get his throat cut by the mother? Nobody references this injury, and he doesn't seem to take offense at it, which is baffling. Clearly she's willing to sacrifice a little boy who is NOT her actual son, but has been a part of her family for his entire life. It's a strange story issue... but it leads to what happens with his birth father, Col. Quaritch. • speaking of Spider, the kid: they explain that he couldn't return to Earth when he was born 10-12 years ago because they couldn't put babies in cryo for the long space journey. I get that. But he's clearly blended in with the Nav'i culture... why not put him through the process and make him a human/alien hybrid? Why does he remain a human, forced to wear an oxygen mask for pretty much the entire film, constantly in danger of being poisoned by the atmosphere of Pandora? This is a loose end that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. • How much time went on in this story? They have several montages of the kids in Metkayina (the another tribe on the planet) trying desperately to learn to swim and dive and hold their breath and communicate with giant sea creatures, but we don't really know if they were there a week... a month... months? It's a little cloudy. As for visual issues: I was *conscious* of the much-criticized 24fps vs. 48fps HFR speed changes, but it didn't kill me. My take is they didn't just do the entire film at 48fps because then (as many have noted) it would basically look like a CGI video game. Since "most" of it is at 24fps, a lot of it "feels like a movie," which is fine. But in the last hour, the number of times they switched frame-rates gave me whiplash. I'm baffled as to why they didn't just give up and leave it at 48fps for the entire battle until the ship sinks. BTW, not a lot of people ask *why* they changed to 48fps at all. The problem is: when you combine 3D with HDR, it exaggerates the flicker inherent in 24fps (even assuming they showed each frame twice or three times, which is a trick going back to film projectors to minimize flicker). The 48fps does reduce the problem but I think also adds to the "unreality" of the experience, which is not good in a movie that's maybe 80% CGI. I understand why they did it, but I'm not entirely sure I agree with it. I wonder whether more motion blur might have helped... and yet I don't doubt they experimented for months (hell, years) trying to crack that formula. We went through that with The Hobbit back in 2012, and I thought it was haaaaarible... but the later Hobbit films were fine for me. Last issue: I'm not sure why more people don't call out Avatar 2 as being an *animated movie*. It's photorealistic animation, and I think they achieve some incredibly-believable looks while avoiding The Uncanny Valley with the characters, but I wonder why all the hoopla, shooting with 4K 3D cameras with actors in live sets, when basically all that was doing was capturing VFX references for the animated aliens that populate the movie. BTW, I looked very carefully at the scenes with the human characters (like Spider the kid) and the "recombinant" aliens (human/Nav'i hybrids), and they were flawless. It's a stunning film and despite all my nit-picky technical criticisms, I got caught up again with the story and the characters' emotions. It's a beautiful, beautiful film that takes you to another world and makes you believe it's real, which is all you want in an epic action/SF film. BTW, to me, Sigourney Weaver's character Kiri steals the show, as does Spider the kid -- I would guarantee there's a whole story just with those two. Four stars from me, and this was the second time we saw it. Not a dull moment in the entire 192-minute film.
That is because that list is NOT adjusted for inflation. ET, Jaws, Jurassic Park and Raiders are in the top 25. Cameron has Avatar and Titanic. Using an unadjusted list will simply favor newer movies.
Sometimes writers and filmmakers need to set the story in a fantasy world in order for it to be palatable. Post war Latin America is full of Avatar stories.
100%, though adjusted charts aren't perfect either. Too many factors left out of the equation. Too bad the movie industry didn't settle on tickets sold as the measure of success decades ago and report results that way. That'd be way more apples/apples than $$$.
OK, which just proves that statistics can be interpreted a number of different ways. BoxOfficeMojo and TheNumbers look at a variety of different interpretations, but one I think that's the most interesting is number of paid admissions, and by that token, I bet Gone with the Wind is the real champ, because they were playing that movie 24 hours a day at hundreds of theaters in 1939 and 1940, when ticket prices were about 25 cents. And it still made millions and millions of dollars.
My understanding was that Cameron really wanted a crack at Jurassic Park but simply lost out to Spielberg. James Cameron Says He Wanted To Direct ‘Jurassic Park,’ Would’ve Been Like ‘Aliens’ | IndieWire Chatting with the UK’s Huffington Post, Cameron revealed that at one point he was chasing “Jurassic Park” as something to direct. “I tried to buy the book rights and he beat me to it by a few hours,” he said. And really, thank God for that because as Cameron elaborates, his version would have been darker. “But when I saw the film, I realised that I was not the right person to make the film, he was. Because he made a dinosaur movie for kids, and mine would have been ‘Aliens‘ with dinosaurs, and that wouldn’t have been fair,” Cameron explained. “Dinosaurs are for 8-year-olds. We can all enjoy it, too, but kids get dinosaurs and they should not have been excluded for that. His sensibility was right for that film, I’d have gone further, nastier, much nastier.”
Methinks JAMES CAMERON needs to helm a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie next year! No more syrupy sweetness at the end! THERE WILL BE BLOOD! The first Hallmark Christmas movie to feature aliens, dinosaurs •and• dismemberment!
Watched True Lies (1994) the other day and miss when Cameron made awesome action films like that one. That whole sequence on the Seven Mile Beidge is a testament to big action.
First I heard of it. From Wikipedia: Before its publication, Steven Spielberg learned of the novel in October 1989, while he was discussing a screenplay with Crichton that would become the television series ER. Spielberg recognized what really fascinated him about Jurassic Park was it was "a really credible look at how dinosaurs might someday be brought back alongside modern mankind", going beyond a simple monster movie. Before the book was published, Crichton had demanded a non-negotiable fee of $1.5 million for the film rights and a substantial percentage of the gross. Warner Bros. and Tim Burton, Columbia Pictures and Richard Donner, and 20th Century Fox and Joe Dante bid for the rights, but Universal Studios eventually acquired them in May 1990 for Spielberg. I knew about Tim Burton, Joe Dante, and Richard Donner, but had never heard of Jim Cameron, who generally wrote his own movies up to this point and had not yet adapted a novel. The part they left out was: Spielberg had been reading various drafts of the novel and giving feedback to Crichton before the book was published. Crichton was hesitant to base the dinosaur tale at a theme park, because he had already used that setting for Westworld. Spielberg encouraged him to do it anyway, and said that 1) nobody would notice the resemblance, and 2) having dinosaurs at a remote theme park made total sense. Crichton took the note and the novel was the result.
I saw this today, and although I’m not a big fan of shoot ‘em up style movies (which I mean, c’mon this is what it turns into), I thoroughly enjoyed my afternoon. First off, I joined the Regal Cinema club, which made my ticket and concessions half price. The whole deal ran me 15 bucks. I saw it in 3D RPX. So it wasn’t an IMAX theater but it was big enough. Once again the visuals are stunning! The story which many have criticized was ok too. It wasn’t the greatest story ever written but it was plausible enough. Most of the big plot twists (but not all) were easy to anticipate but that’s all right. My only complaint was Cameron could have tightened it up by about 40 minutes, and I would have preferred more Pandora and less Stephen Lang (I really, really dislike his character). Sorry, that’s two isn’t it? Oh, and btw, who was Kate Winslett in this movie?
And Avatar: The Way of Water has moved on up the charts yet again and is about to become the 4th-biggest film of all-time. Will it beat Titanic? ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ Box Office to Capsize ‘Titanic’ – The Hollywood Reporter So right now, James Cameron is in the uncanny position of having made 3 movies in the Top 5 of all-time: 1 Avatar $2,923,706,026 2009 2 Avengers: Endgame $2,799,439,100 2019 3 Titanic $2,194,690,964 1997 4 Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens $2,071,310,218 2015 5 Avatar: The Way of Water $2,056,180,771 2022 6 Avengers: Infinity War $2,052,415,039 2018 7 Spider-Man: No Way Home $1,921,847,111 2021 8 Jurassic World $1,671,537,444 2015 9 The Lion King $1,663,075,401 2019 10 The Avengers $1,520,538,536 2012
