Yep...Titanic (not ashamed to admit that I love that movie) and AVATAR both prove Cameron's talent as a Filmmaker. No doubts that an AVATAR 2 will be in the works.
Well, there you go then. It's also about where you look. All of them received quite a bit of (international) attention. Precious has an Oscar nomination for best actress this March.Let the Right One won many awards aroiund the world. Unfortunately, an English remake is in the making...
Was Precious in a foreign tongue also? Unless it is in English or German, or at least has subtitles for the foreign languages, odds are I won't watch it. I watched Mongul (sp?) and loved it thanks to the subs obviously.
Thanks, wish I could take total credit for it! And queeq, you know you love it
The key thing is, how much ownership does Cameron have with the AVATAR property? I bet he doesn't own it like Lucas owns STAR WARS. As owner, Lucas is virtually the only man (possibly excepting Spielberg) in the world who can sink over $100 million of his own money into a film budget, and be there at the end to get 90% of the huge profits. The old saying in Hollywood is to never invest your own money in a film; well, Lucas has done that since TESB and has been getting richer ever since - it's also his way of having creative control, so the studio has no say. Hollywood has tried to make sure the George Lucas story has never repeated - where they gave him the copyright & merchandising rights in 1977 instead of more upfront money, and they turned him into a multi-billionaire with his own independent empire.
Cameron had to sign away any copyright control with the first Terminator film for the right to direct it himself; that's why he can't stop the other movies happening or even benefit. AVATAR had such a huge budget - with financing from several sources - that I'm pretty sure Cameron doesn't have the same control overall, other than getting paid well with profit percentages.
Lucas may be an even better businessman than a filmmaker. With Cameron, it's the opposite. Digital Domian was supposed to be his own ILM, but he was forced to sell it off, in the wake of his $50 million dollar divorce from Linda Hamilton post Titanic (nice timing there.) Now it's WETA & ILM who are doing his FX work.
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"I'm not smart so much as I am not dumb." - Harlan Ellison
Feb 6th, 2010 10:48 PM
