Legendary Director James Cameron Is Planning His Next Non-Avatar Movie

There are but a few ironclad certainties in life: death, taxes, and the fact that you should never, ever bet against James Cameron. The celebrated filmmaker has made an unparalleled career out of taking some of the most ambitious (and wildly expensive) concepts imaginable and spinning straw into box office gold. Of late, that talent has largely been confined to the world of “Avatar,” which has consumed practically the last two decades of his life. But even though the franchise is set to dominate for at least another three entries (and possibly more, though Cameron himself has stated he wouldn’t be as heavily involved with those), it appears that the director is finally tearing his gaze away from the far-flung world of Pandora and setting his sights on a production much closer to home.

Deadline has the scoop on Cameron’s next intended movie, one that will mark a rare pivot to a non-original and non-“Avatar” project. According to the report, he’s purchased the rights to an upcoming nonfiction book by author Charles Pellegrino titled “Ghosts of Hiroshima.” This tells the true story of perhaps the luckiest man on Earth (or unluckiest, depending on whether you see life with a glass-half-empty lens) who happened to be in the Japanese city of Hiroshima in August of 1945, survived the detonation of the atomic bomb, traveled by train to the nearby city of Nagasaki, and subsequently survived that instance of nuclear holocaust, too. The film adaptation will officially be titled “Last Train From Hiroshima.”

Are we seeing the “Oppenheimer” Effect unfolding in real time, leading to a resurgence in WWII-era movies from some of our biggest and best names in the business? Dads everywhere will likely rejoice, but not nearly as much as Cameron is. Read on for more details!

It was probably only a matter of time before James Cameron, who has depicted some of humanity’s worst acts many times before (from nuclear hellfire in “Terminator 2” to the hubris involved in “Titanic” to the devastation of the environment and Indigenous people in “Avatar” and “Avatar: The Way of Water”), finally decided to tackle the single most destructive military strike in history. In Cameron’s own words, this has been something that’s on his mind for quite some time now … and one that will obviously require a fair amount of sensitivity, given the similar concerns with Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” last year. As Cameron explained in a statement:

“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. 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.”

The director will actually pull from multiple sources to base his script on, including both “Ghosts of Hiroshima” and Charles Pellegrino’s previous book, which is titled “Last Train From Hiroshima.” It’s worth noting that that latter book actually drummed up a bit of controversy soon after publishing in 2010, according to Reuters, stemming from allegations that Pellegrino misrepresented both his own credentials (apparently, he’s not actually the owner of a PhD doctorate he claimed to be) and inaccuracies in the text itself, which was blamed on a misleading source. Nevertheless, Cameron noted to Deadline that he’ll pull from both works to make one “uncompromising theatrical film” told from the Japanese perspective for a change.

Of course, the caveat here is that he’ll do so only when his commitments to “Avatar” aren’t an impediment. The easy joke is to point out how, in that case, this will likely never happen. But as a wise man (that would be me) once told many reasonable readers (that would be you), never bet against James Cameron.