The movie James Cameron said “degrades” cinema: “We have a story crisis”
Regarding the genuine titanic figures of blockbuster cinema, few film directors have as strong a claim to the throne of being the biggest of the lot as James Cameron. With movies grossing over $8billion worldwide, Cameron is the second-highest-grossing director of all time.
And it’s no surprise why, given that he has helmed some of the biggest hitters the movie world has ever known. Among them are The Terminator and its sequel, Judgment Day, Aliens, Titanic and Avatar and its sequel. Quite simply, Cameron is a true monolith of the cinematic world.
There’s no doubt that Cameron loves the cinema industry and once expressed his worry about which direction Hollywood movies were heading in. At the centre of his argument was a 2012 science fiction military action film starring Alexander Skarsgård and Liam Neeson.
Battleship is based on the board game of the same name, directed by Peter Berg, and focuses on a group of warships that are tasked with battling against an opposing extra-terrestrial naval fleet. The film was a box-office bomb as well as being something of a critical disaster — unsurprising given the movie’s premise.
Cameron was also less than impressed by Battleship and claimed that it showed that Hollywood studios were in the midst of a “story crisis”. The quality of the film was not necessarily called into question by Cameron. Still, he pointed out that the fact that it was even made in the first place indicated the cinema industry’s overall problem.
During an interview with Spiegel Online, Cameron said, “Now they want to make Battleship the game into a film! This is pure desperation because now the ‘Sequel Business’ governs Hollywood, or how we call it: the franchise.” The director clearly felt that relying on Hollywood franchises was not the way to go.
He continued: “Everyone in Hollywood knows how important it is that the film, before it hit theatres, is already a brand. If a brand has been around, Harry Potter, for example, or Spider-Man, you are light years ahead… And there lies the problem. Because, unfortunately, [these franchises are becoming more] ridiculous. Battleship. This degrades the cinema.”
Cameron himself is no stranger to a franchise, though, with both The Terminator and Avatar under his belt, but he still felt that Battleship was going a step too far. At least his franchise movies aim to tell a story rather than merely bringing audiences to cinemas solely for the brand name. Unfortunately, it looks as though cinema continues to remain in the same problem.
