Director James Cameron doesn’t know what it means to take a break. He is currently working on Avatar and is one of the best directors alive as well as one of the highest selling directors of all time. And he already has his eyes set on the next movie he plans on directing; Ghosts of Hiroshima.
That’s right, Cameron has made it official and said that he will be adapting the book by Charles Pellegrino into an “uncompromising theatrical film.” We have seen nonfiction movies do well as Hollywood tries to find new movies to make as the superhero genre seems to be failing.
This will be Cameron’s first non-Avatar movie since 1997’s Titanic and we all know how popular that movie is. I do believe the success of Killers of the Flower Moon and Oppenheimer played a role in Cameron directing a nonfiction movie. Simply put, there is a demand for it.
Ghosts of Hiroshima will be released in August 2025, marking the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. The movie right to books often will be bought before the book is published. That is usually because of the author’s reputation and past success. The book tells the true story of a man who survived the atomic blast in Hiroshima and got on a train to Nagasaki and survived the second atomic bomb that targeted the city.
In 2009, Cameron and author Pellegrino visited Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the survivor of the two atomic bombs and discussed making a movie about nuclear weapons. He later said about that meeting “I think it’s Cameron’s and Pellegrino’s destiny to make a film about nuclear weapons.”
“It’s a subject that I’ve wanted to do a film about, that I’ve been wrestling with how to do it, over the years,” Cameron said in an interview with Deadline. “I met Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a survivor of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just days before he died. He was in the hospital. He was handing the baton of his personal story to us, so I have to do it. I can’t turn away from it.” While visiting Yamaguchi, Cameron and Pellegrino pledged to “pass on his unique and harrowing experience to future generations.”
