The only movie since 1982 to beat James Cameron at the box office
Based on cold, hard numbers, James Cameron is the second most successful filmmaker of all time, bested only by the one-man juggernaut of Steven Spielberg. Don’t let that second-place position fool you, though.
By one metric, Cameron beats Spielberg handily. The Jurassic Park director has accumulated over $10 billion at the box office for 36 movies. Cameron, on the other hand, has only directed nine feature films but has still managed to accumulate a staggering $8bn at the box office.
In other words, if you’re planning to release a movie on the same day as the Titanic director, don’t even bother. At this point, distributors should just steer clear of him. Let all Cameron’s release days be blocked out for him and him alone. Let him take the number one spot without a fight. You know it’s going to happen anyway.
He is so successful in this regard that only one of his films since 1982 has failed to take the top spot at the box office. That 1982 caveat is worth highlighting only because it allows us to remember that unholy dumpster fire of a feature debut, Piranha II: The Spawning. He’s been quick to distance himself from it over the years, even suggesting that he didn’t do all of the directing, but like it or not, his name is still in the credits.
So, who was the one and only director to unseat him from box office supremacy? It was the nicest guy in Hollywood, Ron Howard. Yes, that delightful child actor-turned-box office-storming director with an unfailingly generous and sunny disposition was the person to topple a man who, by many accounts, is kind of a tyrant. While that might come as a surprise already, Howard is a fantastically successful filmmaker but has a much spottier track record at the box office than Cameron — the film that did it will likely come as an even greater surprise.
In 1989, Cameron released an underwater action movie with cutting-edge special effects that landed in second place behind a tear-jerking comedy-drama about the highs and lows of family life. It makes no sense from a 21st-century perspective, but somehow, the box office returns for The Abyss fell short of the returns for Parenthood.
The surprising Ron Howard film that beat James Cameron at the box office
There’s no need to attack either of these films on their merits. In fact, both are high points for their respective filmmakers. The Abyss is an exhausting underwater saga that was hell to make but extraordinary to watch even decades later, and Parenthood is one of Howard’s most emotionally sincere (in the best way) dramas. An all-star cast including Steve Martin, Dianne Wiest, Keanu Reeves, and Joaquin Phoenix lend deeply moving performances to a surprisingly raw story about troubled family dynamics, creating a movie that is almost as exhausting as Cameron’s, but in very different ways.
Although The Abyss underperformed box office expectations, it is still a testament to how different audiences were in the late ’80s and early ’90s that it failed to land in the top spot. Contemporary dramas centred on adults were all the rage during this period. The highest-grossing film the year before was Rain Man, Barry Levinson’s drama about two estranged brothers on a road trip following their father’s death. The year after Parenthood and The Abyss collided, the highest-grossing film was the sexy supernatural tear-jerker Ghost.
In a time when comic book movies and animated kids’ movies trounce all other competition, it’s hard to believe that there was ever a moment when a little comedy-drama with little to no special effects could go up against an underwater action movie with an aquatic monster and win, but in 1989, it hardly turned heads. Parenthood went on to gross $126million, compared to just $90m for The Abyss.
