Part 2: James Cameron on ‘Avatar 4’ and ‘5,’ Movie Biz Fears, 3D, Netflix, and Aliens

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0:36This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18+. It is still Monday, November 24th, and I am here with part two of Jim Cameron. We're taping this at his Manhattan Beach studio in his personal screening room where Craig and I watched Avatar Fire and Ash.

1:14Today, we are talking about the business stuff, what he's going to do with Avatar 4 and 5, whether he'll walk away if this one doesn't do well. The budgets for his films, how Fox and now Disney got the movie in the first place. who should buy Warner Brothers and why it shouldn't be Netflix. What do you think of the sphere in Vegas? His director friends? A lot. Plus the return of the lightning round. Today is Jim Cameron, part two. From The Ringer and Puck, I'm Matt Bellany, and this is The Town.

1:45But you've always had this innate confidence. I remember back in 2009, I did a roundtable for Hollywood Reporter. It was an amazing group. It was you. it was Catherine Bigelow, Lee Daniels, Quentin Tarantino, Jason Reitman, Peter Jackson. And it was the morning after the London premiere. Yes, right. And you had just screened the movie publicly and the reviews had just come out. They were pretty ecstatic. They were over the moon positive. Yeah. And we were all shocked. We're like, oh my God, this is going to be a thing. It's not a turkey. And I said to you, I remember saying this to you, like, these reviews are amazing.

2:19And you're like, yeah, they are. Like, you were pretty sure they were going to be good. This is not quite accurate. I remember my wife Susie and I being in our suite wherever it was in London at the Bristol or whatever and literally reading reviews out loud to each other and just laughing our asses off and having another round of champagne. It was like, no, it was pretty exciting. So you were nervous. Do you get nervous? Always. Always. Any film. You're nervous about Avatar 3? Absolutely. You are. Why? Why would I be nervous about Avatar 3? Well, I mean, let's say if I'm the, if I'm the Disney, you know, the business, you see what's happening.

2:56Okay. Yeah. The theatrical market is where it is down. The movie, it does not have 12 years of anticipation like Avatar two did. The marketing challenge on this is how do we distinguish it? How do we make it feel different, but also the world of Avatar that you love. There's lots of challenges, but you consistently have performed. And I, And everyone in town says, never bet against Jim Cameron. It's interesting that you have doubts still. No, no, absolutely. Look, every time you put out a film, your mind racks up all the potential negatives, all the forces against you, right? Sequelitis. People tend to dismiss sequels.

3:36Unless it's the third Lord of the Rings film and you want to see what happens to everybody. Which in my mind, this is. This is the culmination of a story arc. But that may not be how the public sees it. But I think the biggest factor right now is the streaming on COVID one-two punch that really hammered our business. And the fact that people have redirected their habit patterns, have redirected to streaming, to prioritizing access and availability and comfort over venturing out, going to the dedicated experience. People are still going to the movies, but it's only 75 % of what it was in 19, and it hasn't rebounded.

4:17It's got to be an event now. Yeah, it has to be an event. And so that's really narrowing. I think it's an impact on the entire business in terms of what studios can greenlight. And it goes back to that thing we were talking about with the respect to cost. The kind of movies that I like to watch, let's say Dune or even Wicked, right? I almost made Wicked back when. Really? I really loved the story. I mean, Wizard of Oz is one of my favorites. This is going back, I don't know, 15 years. You talked to Universal about it? Yeah, I didn't. I think they've redone some of the music. I couldn't find the song.

4:52That's a very different movie. I couldn't find the song. Maybe not. Maybe not. Maybe not. You got a musical in you? I don't know. I don't know. Well, my favorite movie is a musical. What's that? Wizard of Oz. Wizard of Oz, right? But anyway, the point is, so let's say Dune Wicked, all right? They don't have a lot in common as storytelling, but they both have big sets and they cost a lot of money in VFX. I couldn't even say. A hundred million in VFX? I'm just guessing. wildly wildly don't hold me to any of that but the point is how many movies are going to get green lit where you're spending that amount of money on vfx that are not tried and true blue chip ip where does the young up and coming aspiring filmmaker with whose head whose head is bursting with ideas like the terminator and aliens and the abyss and that where do they get their foothold they don't it's got to be cheaper yeah it's got to be cheaper by the way have you seen wizard of the sphere not yet but it's are you interested in that i'm very interested because i like the sphere as a format or sphere as a format and i'm looking for a way to actually do something myself i want to see the decisions that they made around linear narrative with cutting to close-ups and medium shots and wide shots and how well that worked a lot of people call it a butchering of an artist that's another matter see i was i hadn't gotten to the other shoe dropping which is that I'm vehemently opposed to people changing somebody else's art, right?

6:15So Victor Fleming and I think three or four other directors all worked on that film. But nevertheless, there were artists, probably more the producer, Selznick, at the time. But there were artists who made a film. They're all dead. Their estates are not, to my knowledge, involved in this. The studio that owned the IP has decided they're going to completely revisit those artistic decisions. Put the CEO of the company in the movie. That kind of tells you, you know, where the... David Zasloff is in the movie. Yeah, okay, all right, fine. As a munchkin or what? They're floating by in the tornado scene in a boat.

6:51Okay. He and Jim Dolan. Okay, all right, fine. Have fun with that, guys. But it seems to me like a filmmaker like you would never... That's fiddling while Rome burns. Right, but a filmmaker like you would never allow that. Well, I mean, look, I mean, once you're dead, there's not a lot you can do about it Unless you've set things in motion and a framework exists. But I think this is going to become more relevant to actors and their persona. So I think a perfect example, I haven't talked about this with Sigourney, but Sigourney is so closely associated with Ripley. The Ripley played by Sigourney is now something that exists in our zeitgeist, right?

7:30It's a type. It's an archetype. Not just an archetype that other people emulate. It's actually a character played by a specific actor that we all think is great and we can't imagine anybody else playing her. That doesn't mean they won't cast somebody else as Ripley at some point. But the point is Sigourney could theoretically sell that impremature of her voice and her image associated with that character and benefit from it financially. Or she may say, as an artist, that's a horrific concept to me and I would never do that. That my performance is what defined it. Well, you see these artists that are selling their name and likeness and voice for AI.

8:09Sure. James Earl Jones did it before he died. And he made that decision. But the critical point here is informed consent, right? Yeah. He knew how it would be used. He knew what the possibilities were with the technology, and he decided to sell that. Yeah. Right? Great. That's his decision. Sigourney's decision or anybody else's decision might be very, very different. You know, and that is where that informed consent of the artist needs to be really entrenched and protected. So let's talk a little bit about the business. How much do you follow the headlines in town and what's going on? A little, you know, I just kind of keep my head down swimming, getting a movie made.

8:49But the ground is moving. Shifting under our feet, right? Yeah. I mean, you made a movie with David Ellison, Terminator movie. What do you think of him buying Paramount and trying to take over Warner Brothers? I think he's the best possible choice. You do? Absolutely. Above Netflix, above Comcast? Oh, Netflix would be a disaster. Sorry, Ted, but geez, Sarandos has gone on record saying theatrical films are dead. Outmoded, yeah. No, theatrical is dead, quote unquote. Theatrical is dead. I don't know if he said that, but he said that it's an outmoded experience. No, no, it's a quote. For most. It's a quote, at least to the extent that you can verify anything.

9:26But now he's promising theaters if they buy Warner Brothers. I know, but it's, but it's, it doesn't believe it's sucker bait. Yes. Right. It's sucker bait. And we'll put the movie out for a week. We'll put it out for 10 days. We'll qualify for Academy Awards consideration. See, I think that's fundamentally rotten at the core. A movie should be made as a movie for theatrical and the Academy Awards to me mean nothing if they don't mean theatrical. And I think they've been co-opted and I think it's horrific. You don't think Netflix should be allowed to compete for Oscars. They should be allowed to compete if they put the movie out for a meaningful release in 2 ,000 theaters for a month.

10:05Yeah. I mean, the Academy has recently changed its rules, so you have to be on 50 screens for best picture consideration. Give me a fucking break. We're going to be on 7 ,500 screens. I know. Okay. But your movie is on another plane. Okay. So take an indie. Take an indie that gets bought. You know, take an A24 film, whatever. They're not going out with less than 1 ,000. Yeah. Some do, though. Some of these foreign films that are getting nominated now, they do a small release. But in their home territories, I'm sure they saturate that territory at the scale that they play at in Spain or Norway or whatever.

10:42So you think Netflix would be a disaster for Warner Brothers, but big tech - Well, Warner Brothers would just become a streamer. And so now you've lost an actual theatrical major, and now you've just increased that avalanche, that sort of downhill trend. Because the thing is, that streaming got its foothold with the artistic base that they did. And I'm not just saying Netflix, I'm saying all of them by throwing crazy money at it and attracting the A-list talent and then pulling the carpet out from underneath that, right? So now budgets are half or a third of what they were. The movies like Dune, Wicked, Avatar, whatever, they're not getting greenlit for streaming.

11:24And they're also not getting greenlit by the theatrical side of the existing majors, right? So now it's fallen through the middle, unfortunately. Yeah, I mean, Netflix has tried. They did a Zack Snyder movie. They've done some Russo Brothers movies that are on the level of budgets that you would get for that stuff. It just hasn't really worked. Because that's not their business. It's not their business. You're right. Yeah, it's Disney's business. Yes. It's historically been Paramount's business. It's historically been Warner Brothers' business. They did very well with the Dune films. You know, they play at that level.

11:57But big tech is here to stay, is it not? I mean, one of the biggest movies of the year is F1. That was financed and released, not released, but financed by Apple. Yeah, exactly. And I enjoyed F1. I bet you did too. Yeah, absolutely. But that's the point that I'm making is that we got to bring the big imaginative films, whether it's science fiction or historical or fantasy, any place that takes you out of a location and differentiates from the kind of indie, you know, kind of dramatic market or the rom-com market or whatever, the big fantasy science fiction, imaginative movies require VFX. VFX are expensive.

12:33So if the curve of VFX costs continuously rises and the curve of affordability of those movies or let's say the green lighting curve is coming down and theatrical is coming down, when those curves cross, those movies don't exist anymore, okay? And the few people making them, like me age out and then pretty, and the people coming up behind them aren't, aren't trained in it. Right. You mentioned the training and that's a question I wanted to ask you since Avatar came out, huge hit. No one has been able to do what you are doing. Why is that? Why are there no movies that are made with 3d in mind like this, not converted or not what they're doing to others.

13:17Everyone said at the time that Avatar came out, oh, the 3D revolution is here. There's going to be 3D movies. There's going to be movies like this. And it was. It was for a while. It was for a little bit, but then it went away. Well, it wasn't a little bit. It was about 10 years. But nobody's doing what you're doing. Why can nobody do this? They're doing it with conversion. So your Marvel films typically are released in 3D through conversion. But it sucks. It sucks. I know. And you had other top filmmakers who were experimenting with it, like Scorsese and Ang Lee and so on, that actually authored in 3D.

13:47And the result is that there are movies like Prometheus and Life of Pine and Hugo look spectacular. Ridley Scott, I left him off that list. So they all experimented with it. And I think the tool set was a bit cumbersome. But by the way, so is 70 millimeter. And that didn't stop Brian Coogler from shooting sinners with a hundred pound camera because he believed in it, right? But I think the biggest limitation on 3D has been light levels in the theater. What is your preferred format? I prefer Dolby Vision and IMAX about equally. IMAX is a bigger screen. They don't quite hit the light levels of Dolby Vision, but it's a big screen.

14:25And 3D wants you to sit close and fill your field of view, right? Dolby Vision is a little bit smaller screen, but they have better, brighter light levels because of laser projection. And when they go onto big screens, they do dual laser projection. That doesn't answer the question, though, of why can nobody do what you do? When I watched an Avatar movie and you were going inside the helicopter, showing me a whale coming towards it, showing me a creature coming towards it and into the audience and you get the full view of what's going on. And it is absolutely thrilling. Why can nobody replicate that in 3D?

15:02Yeah, look, I don't know. It's a personal choice, I guess. Is it a huge pain in the ass? No, it's not a pain in the ass at all. Let me tell you, on an avatar set, 3D takes up about two minutes of my day, if that. Because every once in a while, there'll be something that we're doing that's a bit unconventional, maybe some splashing coming toward the camera or something that I know might be a bit of an issue. And I'll go over and look at a playback of the take. That takes me an extra 30 seconds. And maybe that happens two or three times a day. My team is so well-versed in shooting good 3D. We've been doing it for 25 years.

15:37we know what we're doing and you don't have any pushback from the studio from disney do you ever what is your what are your conversations you want to really drill down on this and you're a drill down you're a drill down i am a drill down person all right when the studio tells a production to shoot in 3d everything that goes wrong on the movie is 3d's fault okay so that creates a sense on the studio's part over a period of years we're not going to mess with 3D, we're going to do conversion. Now, the issue is that in fact, conversion costs more money than the incremental cost of shooting 3D, which is not zero, but it might be two to four percent of your entire production budget.

16:19It's not a big deal as opposed to cramming in a fast, bad conversion into your post schedule and spending five to eight million dollars doing that just right out the window to a conversion house to get a mediocre to bad result that the filmmaker has not put into their authoring. So it's in imbuing the production with the 3D ethos. It's viewing. But I'm talking larger. No, no, but the bigger picture is that puts the studio in a control position, right? If the filmmaker wants to do it, they're along for the ride. They're paying for the delta, right? What if they decide in post they don't like the movie and they don't want to spend as much money on it as they might have.

17:02Or they can see a film that's a little bit of a kind of a sleeper hit and they can throw money at it. It just shifts control from the filmmaker to the studio. That's what it's all been about. And at the same time, you have 95 % of theaters are inferior light levels. 95%. It's not a trivial number, right? So you've got a few premium screens and you can bet that when we show it to the press and we show it to the critics and all that, we make sure the light levels are there. I'm sure this room has the correct light level. Yeah, yeah. It looks pretty good, right? You've seen it. Yes. Right? But is it even possible for you to come up with a number of what an Avatar movie costs?

17:40Oh, yeah, sure. We have this little thing we like to call accounting. No, I know. But you're making them, you know, you have people that are employees that are making multiple movies. Yeah. Like, what does this movie cost? Yeah, it all goes into a big pot that amortizes across the two movies. And our R &D that we spend with our VFX providers gets amortized across multiple movies and all that sort of thing. But those are all just accounting schemes. If you think coming into this interview that I am going to answer a question that you need to ask Bob Iger, you've got another dream coming. But what would Bob Iger tell me?

18:16That's up to him. It's his money. Like$300,$400? That's up to him. It's his money. My point is it doesn't matter because they know you're going to perform. I can answer the question in the following way. It is one metric fuck ton of money, which means that we have to make two metric fuck tons of money to make a profit. Right. I have no doubt in my mind that this movie will make money. The question is, does it make enough money to justify doing it again? Yeah. Right? And where are you on that? Are you ready to walk away if it doesn't grow two billion? Absolutely. You will? I mean, I've been in Avatar land for 20 years.

18:52Actually, 30 years because I wrote it in 95, right? But I wasn't working continuously on it for those first 10 years. There was a brief flurry of interest in 95, and then everybody said, you're out of your mind. And I shelved it for 10 years, and then we got serious in 2005. Yeah, absolutely. Sure. If this is where it ends, cool. But there's open threads. I know it's a story that has an ending. There is one open thread. There's one open thread. I'll write a book. Okay. Answer everybody's question. Or you hand it over to someone else. Absolutely not. No? You don't hand it over to someone else? Well, look, I mean, I have choices there.

19:27I can, there are levels in which I immerse. Yeah, you've talked about maybe not directing five. I can produce it. I don't think there'd ever be a version where there's another Avatar movie that I didn't produce closely, right? But in terms of it taking over my life, you know, that's a threshold issue for me. And you're doing this other Ghosts of Hiroshima movie. I have 10 other projects. That one just sort of hit the headlines briefly because of the book announcement. Right. And trying to push the book to a bestseller because the author is a friend of mine. And it works. It doesn't mean I'm not going to make the film, but I haven't written the script, and it's not slated right now, and I don't even have a distribution partner on it.

20:07So it's pretty much a vaporware project right now. Well, and you've got to do your musical that's inside of you. Yeah, well, I've got a couple of other projects that I've purchased or optioned or written. Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? ZepBound Terzepatide may be able to help. ZepBound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity. or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off. ZepBound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15 milligram injection.

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22:13Z-Bound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15 milligram injection. Z-Bound contains terzepatide and should not be used with other terzepatide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if ZepBound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it. Or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2, tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop ZepBound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic reaction.

22:51Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia, if you're nursing, pregnant, plan to be, or taking birth control pills. Taking ZepBound with a sulfonylurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems. Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979 or visit zepbounds.lily.com. how would you describe your relationship with disney very very good no no not very good give me a more descriptive word respectful respectful yeah absolutely collaborative okay right so uh there's steve asbel who runs the fox unit but i i work more closely with alan and uh and bob weighs in because a big chunk of change for those guys bob eiger right when bob eiger weighs in what does he say and what is he what are his comments typically he's interesting he doesn't weigh in until it's something for me to show does it need to be 3 15 is that what he says no no he watched his comment when he watched the film for the first time even though it was at three hours 23 minutes not including credits at that point so it's gotten about 20 minutes shorter or 18 minutes shorter since then he said yeah i know you're gonna keep keep um you know chopping away at it he said but it's magnificent it's magnificent he said he basically said i love this film and it was interesting because there were other other heads on the on the the zoom that were bringing up notes and he said yeah you know i didn't have a problem with that he basically shot them down on their notes and i was like okay we're done here wow that's nice that was a fun it was a fun he's got a big investment they're doing an avatar land in disneyland they're doing a lot so i sidebarred the notes comment and and i said all right you guys write up your the things that you know because you're very savvy you've done a lot of movies you know what works i said just send me all your stuff and then i i respond you know line by line paragraph by paragraph i say okay if you're feeling that it's not a hill i want to die on i can take that out you know i don't agree with you on this one and here's why and so you know they'll bat maybe 50 percent of the notes get some That sounds like a very reasonable process.

25:14That is not what I expected on a notes call. Oh, I don't, I'm never, hey, let me be the artist and, and, you know, I'll figure this all out and you guys will all be happy. I don't do that. You know, there was one thing that went round where they didn't like the scene. They had specific reasons. I was fond of it, but I said, okay, fine, I'll, I'll take it out. And because we had also gotten some notes from the, from the audience at a, two recruited sneaks. And you do test. I took the scene out and it just bothered me for like two months. And I finally wrote, you know, Alan Bergman, obviously. I wrote him a note and I said, I'm putting the scene back in because I feel it's a scene I like.

25:55Look, people ask me, well, why are you getting stuck in a rut of Avatar? I said, it's not a rut. It's an opportunity. It's an opportunity for me to explore all different aspects of family, of humanity, of, you know, conservation and the environment. all the things that are important to me, you know, as a father and as a sustainability advocate and all that sort of thing, I could explore everything I need to explore within that very, very broad canvas. You know, that's a compliment when people say that they, they want you to do something else or whatever, but it's there, but they're imposing their wants and needs on my reality.

26:29And that doesn't go very far with me. You came up with this when you were a kid, you had the whole thing in your head 19 i dreamed i dreamed the world yeah you know and you dreamed this world you i believe you dreamed the terminator yes and there was something else that uh oh the abyss yeah was was a personal something personal about you yeah and and there's a scene in aliens that's right out of a dream when she goes into the egg chamber and realizes she has inadvertently walked into the most dangerous place in the universe it's a great scene yeah right and everything goes quiet and you just hear the breathing yeah exactly i saw that when i was nine and i put my legs up on the chair in the theater because i was so terrified of something coming below me yeah cool that's cinema right yeah sure that's cinema um that wouldn't have happened sitting on your sofa watching watching netflix no not not on netflix i mean do you get mad when people discover your movies on home video no no no avatar two was in the top 10 last night on disney plus because people are watching it to get ready for this.

27:29That doesn't bother you? No, no, not at all. Not at all. As long as they keep in the back of their minds that there was a part of the experience that they're not having. Right. You know. Yeah. I was curious why you were doing a Billie Eilish documentary, and then I saw that you have a 19-year-old daughter. Is that the reason? Actually, my kids aren't especially fans of Billie. They're not not fans, but they're not especially fans. What's your idea to do that? I've sort of just admired her career from when she was 15. I just think she's remarkable as an artist. But it had to do with my wife Susie is in sustainability and plant-based foods and that sort of thing.