With several titanic box office successes—and a third Avatar film expected to gross more than $2 billion—the Oscar-winning director is now in elite company in Hollywood.
One of the biggest surprises in Hollywood on December 8—at least among news not related to the battle for Warner Bros. Discovery—was Avatar: Fire and Ash not being nominated in any of the major categories for this year’s Golden Globe Awards. In an acknowledgement that the upcoming sequel to two of the top three highest-grossing films of all time is likely to be the biggest movie of the year, and could potentially gross over $2 billion, the awards body did nominate it in the Cinematic and Box Office Achievement category, despite the fact that the movie won’t actually be released until this Friday.
Such is the confidence in Avatar director James Cameron. Over the course of his 40-year career, the 71-year-old filmmaker has increasingly made big bets on his projects, facing sky-high expectations to always produce a motherlode of box-office gold. Beginning in the 1980s with The Terminator and Aliens and extending through Titanic and the first two Avatar movies, Cameron’s movies have collectively earned nearly $9 billion at the global box office, and his share of those earnings form the bulk of a personal net worth Forbes now estimates to be $1.1 billion.
Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images
That puts Cameron on the extremely short list of filmmakers who have reached billionaire status, including George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson and Tyler Perry. And unlike the others, who had significant deals or revenue streams outside of Hollywood, Cameron has reached the mark almost entirely from the success of his movies. Yet in interviews he denies any mention of his wealth (through a representative, he declined to be interviewed for this story).
“I wish I was a billionaire,” Cameron said in a recent podcast interview with Puck’s Matt Belloni. “The billionaire thing assumes certain deals that didn’t exist, one, and, two, that I’ve never spent a dime in 30 years.”
Even after accounting for Cameron’s extensive underwater exploration, conservationist philanthropy and real estate transactions—plus his long track record of sacrificing or risking his personal paychecks to maintain creative control—Forbes estimates that his salaries, profit participations, licensing revenues for theme parks and toys, and equity value from his production company Lightstorm Entertainment more than make up the difference.
And in the coming months, he’s only going to get richer. Forbes estimates that Cameron stands to make at least $200 million (before taxes and fees) on Avatar: Fire and Ash, assuming the movie lives up to its lofty box office expectations.
It’s an extraordinary rise for the one-time college dropout, who worked as a truck driver in his early 20s before landing a job as a production assistant for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, which he says paid $175 per week. Cameron’s first directing gig, 1981’s Piranha II: The Spawning, didn’t pay much better, especially after he was fired two weeks into production over creative differences and only received half of the promised $10,000 fee.
His big break came three years later, with The Terminator, an idea he says came to him in a fever dream while sick in Rome working on Piranha II. In exchange for the assurance that he would be allowed to direct the movie, Cameron made his first major gamble and sold his script to producer Gale Anne Hurd for $1. The movie grossed $78 million globally against a $6.4 million budget, launching the careers of Cameron and star Arnold Schwarzenegger and kicking off a franchise that has now grossed over $2 billion at the box office in total. After marrying Hurd in 1985, Cameron quickly followed with 1986’s Aliens ($131 million gross on a reported $18 million budget) and 1989’s The Abyss ($90 million gross on a reported $70 million budget). The couple divorced that year.
This conversation of money—how much his films cost, and how much they earn—has followed Cameron throughout his career. He developed a reputation as an intense perfectionist (“I was an asshole in the ‘80s,” he admitted recently), with a penchant for going over budget, a style that put enormous pressure on each movie to succeed commercially. Yet in almost every instance, he has delivered.
In 1991, Terminator 2: Judgement Day was the most expensive Hollywood production ever at the time—with a budget of more than $90 million—due in part to his use of nascent computer-generated imagery (CGI). Then it became the year’s highest-grossing movie, topped $500 million at the global box office and made millions more in VHS sales (at an astronomical initial retail price of $99.95).
In addition to his $6 million salary for the film, Cameron was rewarded with a five-year, $500 million contract from Fox for his production company Lightstorm Entertainment, to fund a whole slate of projects he would write, direct and produce.
King of the Box Office: Cameron’s movies, including Titanic, The Terminator and Avatar—have grossed nearly $9 billion combined.
Paramount/20th Century Fox/Orion Pictures/Newscom
The partnership would be tested on his very next movie, True Lies starring Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis, which blew past an initially reported budget of $40 million budget and a studio-mandated cap of $70 million to become what is believed to be the first production to cost over $100 million. Rather than compromise his creative control, Cameron renegotiated his Fox deal to allow the studio to take money from his proceeds to recoup its investment. Once again the movie performed above expectation, grossing $378 million worldwide and finishing as the third-biggest movie of 1994.
“It did cost me personally to spend more money on [True Lies],” Cameron told Entertainment Weekly at the time, giving what is essentially a thesis statement for his career. ”For me, the desire to create the best possible film always wins out. I just can’t do it less than the way I think it should be. I can’t hack it. It’s a curse. And that mentality is instilled in everyone working on every aspect of the film. So everybody spends more to make it better.”
That creative conflict would repeat itself on a much larger scale with 1997’s Titanic. As the budget ballooned past $200 million, for digital as well as practical effects that included sinking an entire ship, Cameron offered to give back the money he was paid for directing and producing ($7 million, per Forbes reporting at the time), plus his back-end gross participation. Media outlets couldn’t resist reaching for metaphors of an expensive sinking ship, and the studio braced for box-office disaster.
“Jim’s confidence never wavered,” says Josh McLeglen, first assistant director on Titanic and Avatar tells Forbes. “He works right on the edge of what’s possible—and then he’ll push the limit.”
The movie would go on to gross $1.8 billion in its initial theatrical run, making it the top-earning movie of all time, then sold a staggering 58 million VHS tapes, earning an estimated $800 million. As a make-good for Cameron, Fox gave him 10% of the movie’s profits, per Forbes reports, netting him around $150 million before taxes and fees.
When Titanic won 11 Oscars the following year, including Best Picture and Best Director, leading Cameron famously quoted his own movie from the stage: “I’m the king of the world!”
Despite that success, Fox initially passed on his next movie, a sci-fi epic that would take place on a planet created entirely with digital effects. By Cameron’s own admission, the technology to produce Avatar as he imagined it did not yet exist, a creative challenge that would soon become an economic one for his newly founded digital effects company, Digital Domain. Jon Landau, the producer who became Cameron’s right-hand-man on Titanic and would work with him until his death last July, wrote in a posthumous memoir that in its first year, Cameron’s creative team spent the entire $10 million research and development budget allotted in the deal with Fox.
Yet, as was his way, Cameron kept pushing. At a cost of $14 million, he and his collaborators built a new 3D camera system. He also developed head rigs for Weta Digital’s facial capture technology, so an actor’s performance could be translated to their digital character, and a simulcam technology with the help of Giant Studios that allowed him to see the digital characters he was filming rendered in the digital environments in real time.
“He was developing tools and perfecting something else every day,” says Candice Alger, then-CEO of Giant Studios. “I’ve worked with a lot of directors, but I’ve never worked with anyone who was so engaged with the tech. Other directors see them as tools and then they surround themselves with people that know how to leverage those tools. Jim is hands-on, always.”
Avatar would, of course, shatter the paradigm of box office success in 2009 with nearly $3 billion in box office receipts. Because Fox pursued outside financing for 60% of the movie’s budget, limiting its exposure to a potential failure, many reaped the returns, including private equity firm Dune Capital Management. Ingenious Media, an investment consortium made up of dozens of U.K. celebrities, including David Beckham, Sacha Baron Cohen, Peter Gabriel and Guy Ritchie, reportedly split nearly $400 million in profits on an investment of around $75 million.
Forbes estimates Cameron’s take on the first Avatar film—which was nominated for nine Oscars and won three, including Best Visual Effects—to be more than $350 million from box office and home video sales, before taxes and fees. And because he and Lightstorm owned the underlying IP, he has earned millions more each year since in licensing deals for toys, merchandise and a theme park ride at Disney’s Animal Kingdom theme park in Orlando, Florida.
That money has allowed Cameron to invest in his other passions, including environmental conservation—he cofounded New Zealand-based Cameron Family Farms in 2012, climate advisory group Avatar Alliance Foundation in 2013, and plant-based foods company Verdient in 2017—and deep-sea exploration. Among many underwater adventures, Cameron has famously traveled to the ocean’s deepest point, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. He now lives full-time in New Zealand, where he reportedly owns more than 3,000 acres of land, having sold several properties during a departure from California in 2020.
Cameron’s fascination with technology manifested most recently in Lightstorm Vision, which partnered with Meta in December to create 3D experiences for the company’s Meta Quest. And last September, he joined the board of directors for StabilityAI, makers of the photo and video generator Stable Diffusion.
Still, his filmmaking appetite has never diminished. After a pair of Avatar sequels were greenlit, Cameron spent nearly a decade creating new underwater technology for 2022’s The Way of Water, which delivered $2.3 billion at the box office. Cameron, who had an estimated 20% “first dollar gross” deal, pocketed another $250 million for the movie.
In the recent lead-up to Fire and Ash, Cameron has been steadfast that he has plans for a fourth and fifth Avatar movies, but indicated that this movie would once again have to prove itself at the box office for the next batch of sequels to get the go-ahead. By his own account, each movie costs “one metric fuck-ton of money” to produce, as well as considerable time, because he captures the performances in real time like a theatrical play and then constructs the cinematography digitally during editing and post-production.
“It’s kind of nuts, right?” Cameron recently said of his production style. “If we hadn’t made so much damn money with the first film we’d never be doing this—I mean it’s insane.”
More from Forbes
