The simple formula that set the stage for James Cameron’s record-breaking career
There are certain filmmakers who just seem to know what their audience wants, and as a result, they become incredibly popular and successful. This has been the case for James Cameron, who emerged just after the New Hollywood era, a period that transformed mainstream cinema forever. He has mastered the ability to consistently make blockbusters, becoming one of the highest-grossing filmmakers of all time.
His feature debut, Piranha II: The Spawning, might not have been the most enduring entry to the film industry, but he was then able to make The Terminator two years later, which would become his breakthrough. The movie was received with mixed reviews, but it is now a cult classic, heralded as one of the greatest sci-fi movies ever made. Still, at the time, it grossed more than Cameron could have anticipated, setting the tone for the rest of his career.
From there, he made movies like Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, cementing him as a giant of the science-fiction genre. It was 1997’s Titanic, however, that shot Cameron to new heights of Hollywood royalty. The film was a huge hit, surpassing its boundaries as a blockbuster and instead becoming a cultural phenomenon. Cameron actually journeyed down to the real Titanic wreckage to film footage, dedicating himself to the project for several years.
It became the highest-grossing movie of all time, although his next feature film, Avatar, would surpass this record just over a decade later. The film had been in development for years, and Cameron used innovative technology to make it, allowing his project to become yet another feat of modern filmmaking.
Since the release of Avatar, the director has been working on the sequels, with Avatar: The Way of Water emerging in 2022. The next instalments in the franchise are set for release in 2025 and 2029, which will bring his decades-long project to an end. It is clear that Cameron knows how to make expansive cinematic worlds that cinema goers will be interested in immersing themselves in, and as a result, three of his movies can be found in the top ten list of the highest-grossing movies of all time.
Cameron hasn’t just found this kind of success by pure chance, however. He has studied exactly what consumers want, keeping this in mind when writing his own movies. He explained, via Empire, “Before I wrote The Terminator, I made a list of the top 20 highest-grossing films of that era (the early ‘80s) and did some armchair analytics about what they all had in common, writing down principles like ‘ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances’ etc on a legal pad.”
He added: “It served as a guide on my first couple projects. Unfortunately, I’ve lost the list. But, as you know, once you start putting your films out there, you get a lot of feedback from the audience, good and bad, which can then guide the way in which you tell stories going forward.”
Keeping all of this in mind, Cameron has become one of cinema’s most successful filmmakers. “But I think ultimately it just boils down to a filmmaker’s personal aesthetic. I try to tell stories that I would want to see in a movie theatre. Pretty simple. I never formally studied film at university. My film school was the drive-in movie theatres of Orange County in the ‘70s. Just me and my date, or a pal, and a six-pack. And a speaker hung on the car window.”
