It's a Hollywood axiom right up there with "Nobody knows anything": Never underestimate James Cameron.
— Josh Rottenberg, The Los Angeles Times
If there is anything that one could call conventional wisdom in modern Hollywood, it's that betting on a James Cameron film losing money is a great way to lose your shirt. From his early days in The '80s working on scrappy, low-budget movies to his present-day status as one of the most widely acclaimed filmmakers in the industry, most of the films he's worked on were predicted to be duds that would sink him and whatever studio was foolish enough to fund him, only to squash all expectations and turn out to be some of the biggest juggernauts of The Blockbuster Age of Hollywood.
- 1984's The Terminator had everything working against it. Cameron, a neophyte director whose previous directing work on a low-budget horror sequel led to him getting locked out of the editing room, had a great idea for a script about a killer robot from the future, but was advised by his agent not to do it (Cameron fired him). Arnold Schwarzenegger, who started a hot streak with Conan the Barbarian and was in the middle of shooting its sequel, thought the film was going to be terrible (which he would cop to saying in later years), and was overheard on the set of Destroyer saying the project was "a shit movie". It was a Troubled Production followed by distributor Orion Pictures all but crippling the film, with them taking advice from the actors' agents not to screen it for critics (it had one press screening) and slashing its marketing budget, with only a few defenders at the studio and within the production team championing it. Yet, The Terminator was a smash-hit at release, winning #1 at the box office two weeks in a row during its 1984 launch window, grossing more than $78 million at the box-office against a $6.4 million budget, and spawning a juggernaut franchise that has continued in various forms for several decades afterwards and spawned five sequels (in various timelines), comics, games and more.
- 1991's Terminator 2: Judgment Day also saw naysaying, with producer Mario Kassar later remembering that, prior to it being called an Even Better Sequel, it had been written off as a death knell given how much the Sequel Escalation cost (it was the first movie with a budget surpassing $100 million):Kassar: "The movie that was going to bankrupt Carolco. The most expensive independent movie of all time. Everyone from Larry King to CNN; everyone was destroying the whole thing. I was on the boat in Cannes listening to all the nonsense. Then, of course, the movie opens, and like they say, every success has many fathers. Everyone suddenly became like they knew it was going to be a big hit. They forgot all the bad and terrible things they were saying about Carolco. There were so many fluids, moving elements and it was so expensive for those days, but I went for it, and it paid off."
- 1997's Titanic endured a brutal Troubled Production that ran overbudget, became the most expensive film ever made, earned Cameron a reputation as a Prima Donna Director, and gathered plenty of naysayers who expected a Cleopatra-sized bomb. Cameron himself admitted that he thought he was headed for disaster during production. The first screenings for critics were conducted with great trepidation, as many 20th Century Fox employees expected to lose their jobs once the film bombed. Instead, it became the first film in history to make $1 billion worldwide.Cameron: "We labored the last six months on Titanic in the absolute knowledge that the studio would lose $100 million. It was a certainty."
- 2009's Avatar didn't experience the Troubled Production of Titanic, but it too ran overbudget and gathered plenty of naysayers. Criticism was aimed at its budget, its heavy use of CGI leading to fears that the entire film would fall into the Unintentional Uncanny Valley (this being when characters like Jar-Jar Binks were still fresh within recent memory), and its cast of "blue cat people" who it was felt audiences wouldn't be able to connect to. 20th Century Fox, which produced Avatar, also released Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel that same weekend as a backup plan in case it flopped. Instead, it became the first film in history to make $2 billion worldwide, and its success inspired a new wave of 3-D movies in the early 2010s. Even more insane, it made close to $3 billion. If you don't adjust for inflation, no movie except Avengers: Endgame (both around $2.8 billion) has gotten even close to the amount of money it made.
- 2019's Alita: Battle Angel is an example by proxy. Cameron wanted to adapt Battle Angel Alita for years, though he wound up only writing and producing due to both his deep sea diving endeavours and his work on the Avatar sequels, with Robert Rodriguez directing. Prior to release, it was considered another one of those expensive and disappointing pet projects, not helped by the bad reputation of Hollywood adaptations of anime/manga and the Unintentional Uncanny Valley complaints about the title character's Big Anime Eyes. While critics were lukewarm, it got an excellent reception from audiences who deemed it the first time Hollywood made a manga adaptation well, and while it underperformed domestically, the $400 million it earned worldwide defied pessimistic expectations. Cameron, Rodriguez and producer Jon Landau are not-so-secretely working behind the scenes to have a sequel happen.
- Many people genuinely did not expect 2022's Avatar: The Way of Water to succeed. It was the third film of Cameron's to break budgetary recordsnote , such that Cameron estimated that it would have to be the eighth-highest-grossing film of all time just to break even. Cameron's last feature film was thirteen years prior, and that film, Avatar, had become a pop culture punchline in the years since, remembered as having allegedly left "no cultural impact" beyond the groundbreaking special effects despite its enormous box-office intake. The Way of Water, it was assumed, was entering a film industry that had left it and films like it behind as multimedia Modular Franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe (which Cameron had publicly criticized) took over blockbuster filmmaking, it being a sequel to a film that stood alone and, until then, did not create that big of a franchise to keep it in the public eye. Cameron himself worried that he may have waited too long to make it. In the end though, it took less than two weeks for it to make over a billion dollars worldwide and one month to reach two billion.Cameron: I was a little concerned that I had stretched the tether too far, in our fast-paced, modern world, with Avatar 2 coming in 12 years later. Right until we dropped the teaser trailer, and we got 148 million views in 24 hours.
