The legal legacy of ‘Avatar’: How many times has James Cameron been sued?
In 2009, James Cameron released Avatar, his long-gestating science-fiction epic. It made $2.9billion at the box office, enough to crown it the biggest movie of all time. Then, 13 years later, the sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, arrived and added another $2.3billion to the coffers. The “king of the world” was, once again, on top.
However, in the time between the first and second movies, Cameron’s tale of ten-foot-tall blue, catlike aliens and the paraplegic space marine who loves them incited debate in all corners. The Avatar defenders loved the movie and argued that Cameron created a world so vivid and fully realised on the alien planet of Pandora that they were depressed they couldn’t live there.
On the other hand, the detractors claimed no one actually cared about Avatar, despite it receiving strong reviews and making an inhuman amount of money. These same detractors returned for the sequel, which again received largely positive reviews and garnered box office numbers that would make Marvel weep.
In truth, though, there was one aspect of Avatar that even the most hardened fan had to concede. While the movie was a technically pioneering visual marvel and the old-fashioned storytelling made for an emotional, yet rip-roaring adventure, the plot wasn’t exactly brimming with originality. Many people pointed out that the film, on a basic level, was like Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas, and FernGully: The Last Rainforest thrown into a lavishly rendered CGI blender, and that was pretty hard to argue with.
To Cameron’s chagrin, he wasn’t only accused of putting a fresh coat of blue paint on some classical stories and tropes that have been around a very long time. Instead, he found himself fielding a succession of lawsuits from disgruntled writers and former employees who claimed the Titanic director had actually ripped off their intellectual property when creating Avatar.
In 2022, Cameron told GQ magazine, “Any successful film, there’s always some freak with tinfoil under their wig that thinks you’ve beamed the idea out of their head. And it turned out there were ten or 11 of them.”
Now, Cameron is no stranger to fighting his corner in court over accusations of copyright infringement and/or plagiarism. He was sued over The Terminator, Titanic, and even the TV show Dark Angel, but the sheer number of lawsuits brought against Avatar marks it as easily his most litigious film.
To give a brief run-through of the many suits, it’s easiest to simply start at the beginning. Not long after the first movie’s release, the Chinese author Zhou Shaomou claimed that his book The Legend of the Blue Crow was around 80% the same as Avatar, but his case crumbled when Cameron proved he had first started working on the idea as a movie project two years before Shaomou’s book was published.
Next, Canadian restaurateur and former screenwriter Emil Malak alleged that his copyrighted 1998 screenplay, Terra Incognita, bore more than a passing resemblance. This suit had more legs, as it turned out he’d submitted the script to Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment in 2002. Intriguingly, it focused on an indigenous tribe with tails and braids in their hair who live in a tree that houses their culture’s collective memories. Again, even to a defender, that sounds like Avatar by any other name.
Fascinatingly, there was another Lightstorm connection with one of the other suits brought by former employee Eric Ryder. His script, KRZ 2068, was envisioned as an “environmentally-themed 3D epic about a corporation’s colonisation and plundering of a distant moon’s lush and wondrous natural setting”. Once again, that sounds dangerously close to Avatar.
As for the rest of the lawsuits, only two of them are worth mentioning. Novelist Elijah Schkeiban claimed his children’s book, Bats and Butterflies, was plagiarised by Cameron, but a judge ruled the two works were “not substantially similar”. He dismissed the case and even ruled that Schkeiban couldn’t amend his grievance and file suit again.
Lastly, Gerald Morawski was the only complainant that Cameron actually admitted to meeting. He even confessed to lending Morawski $5,000 for another project. Still, he categorically denied that the man pitched him the story of Avatar in 1991, four years before Cameron says he first began work on the film.
Ultimately, the thing that repeatedly got Cameron out of jail in all these suits was a drawing he did as a 19-year-old attending Fullerton Junior College in 1973. He had a lucid dream of a bioluminescent forest with trees resembling fibre-optic lamps and a river glowing with “bioluminescent particles and kind of purple moss on the ground that lit up when you walked on it”. There were even “lizards that didn’t look like much until they took off”, which is when they “turned into these rotating fans, kind of like living Frisbees”.
As soon as he woke up, the young Cameron sketched his dream and dated it. The modern-day Cameron, a man who has dedicated nearly two decades of his professional life to the world of Pandora, is hugely thankful he did, because this unassuming drawing has repeatedly saved his bacon in court.
