Corona | Coming Attractions

The man that made two back-to-back highest-grossing movies of all-time has gone on the record saying that he's only interested in returning back to the world of Pandora. Of course I'm talking about Avatar and Titanic filmmaker James Cameron, the guy who's currently busy diving to the bottom of the ocean, investing in asteroid mining and writing the screenplays for Avatar 2 and Avatar 3.

Cameron was in China recently to talk business. He was selling his 3D technology and find investment partners for his many ventures, and along the way he sat down with The New York Times for an interview that covered a wide number of topics, of which was what other scripts his production company, Lightstorm Entertainment, was developing. And that's when we learned the following:

"I’ve divided my time over the last 16 years over deep ocean exploration and filmmaking. I’ve made two movies in 16 years, and I’ve done eight expeditions. Last year I basically completely disbanded my production company’s development arm. So I’m not interested in developing anything. I’m in the Avatar business. Period. That’s it. I’m making Avatar 2, Avatar 3, maybe Avatar 4, and I’m not going to produce other people’s movies for them. I’m not interested in taking scripts. And that all sounds I suppose a little bit restricted, but the point is I think within the Avatar landscape I can say everything I need to say that I think needs to be said, in terms of the state of the world and what I think we need to be doing about it. And doing it in an entertaining way. And anything I can’t say in that area, I want to say through documentaries, which I’m continuing. I’ve done five documentaries in the last 10 years, and I’ll hopefully do a lot more. In fact, I’m doing one right now, which is on this, the Deep Sea Challenge project that we just completed the first expedition. So that’ll be a film that’ll get made this year and come out first quarter of next year."

Lightstorm was never a prolific producer of many other movies that Cameron didn't have a heavy hand in shaping. Over the years that I've followed Hollywood, Lightstorm had optioned several properties like Anne Rice's mummy novle Ramses the Damned, developed an asteroid disaster picture called Bright Angels Falling and has the screen rights to the Japanese manga Battle Angel Alita.

Cameron's always marched to the beat of his own drummer. With the tremendous success of Avatar, he's truly now financally independent if he chooses to be so, and can go spend years exploring the ocean, trying to get into space or work on whatever he damn well feels like. The only downside to this is that the world won't get to see more original Cameron movies.