James Cameron: Tech Inventor or Moviemaker?

By comparison, on its premiere night in the US alone, The Interview managed to accrue $1 million in ticket sales, and that was near the peak of Seth Rogen's and James Franco's powers.

Still, it could be argued that Cameron wouldn't be such a big-money moviemaker if he didn't have an eye for the development of key technologies. This goes far beyond his emphatic promotion of 3D cinema when Avatar came out in 2009 – ushering in many years of blurry movie watching – but to new technologies and methods that simply didn't exist before to enable his vision to make it onto the big screen. Here's a look at some of the tech crafted by Cameron in some of his biggest hits over the years.

Picture 1 of James Cameron: Tech Inventor or Moviemaker?

Terminator 2: Judgement Day

In 1984, The Terminator hit the box office with a $6.4 million budget to make $78 million worldwide. It was a tremendous success, helped to catapult Arnold Schwarzenegger to superstardom, and was Cameron's first big hit as a director and writer. Mind you, the bar wasn't set too high in his first outings Xenogenesis (1978) and Piranha II: The Spawning (1982). Seven years later, he was ready to make the sequel bigger and better than ever.

In 1991, Terminator 2: Judgement Day pivoted from the original flick by making Sarah Conner a fully-fledged action heroine; the original Terminator, the T-800, a hero; and going from a sci-fi horror flick to a sci-fi action. With $100 million for the budget, it turned in $515 million at the worldwide box office, marking a real win for everyone involved. A huge part of this was the new villain, only made possible by Cameron's desire for new tech.

The T-1000 blew minds on screen and has become the iconic image of the second movie – which many see as even better than the original. Being able to change form from human to liquid metal made the T-1000 a strangely more menacing threat than even the hulking Schwarzenegger. So memorable is this new villain that it takes center stage in spin-off creations and those with the T2 license, such as the Terminator 2 game in online slots.

The whole premise of the game hinges on the discovery and capture of the T-1000. Leaning into its powers, landing the T-1000 will see it transform into any other character to try to create more winning lines. The slot, which still stands tall among other licensed games like Jurassic Park and WWE Legends, captures this incredible feat of technology. The movie was so impactful that it even spawned Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles, which is set directly after T2, as well as a 3D re-release of the classic flick in 2017.

As it turns out, Cameron needed to invent the technology that would bring his liquid-metal madman to life, crafting the first CGI character in cinema history.

Titanic

While there's already an even larger engine than that which propelled the legendary ship, the Titanic was still a marvel of engineering. Naturally, Cameron couldn't recreate the entirety of the colossal ship for the sake of a movie. Praised across the board, the 1997 movie starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio made a massive $2.2 billion at the worldwide box office, currently sitting fourth of all time. Above it sit two Cameron movies and Avengers: Endgame.

Reviews hailed its special effects and CGI work to bring the Titanic back to life, including esteemed movie reviewer Roger Ebert, who says that they '[were] fooled,' particularly by an overhead shot of the ship setting sail. This shot, Cameron revealed, was of a model of the ship, on which they imposed computer graphics of people acting as they would on the ship having used a motion capture environment, which was pioneering in the late 90s.

Avatar: The Way of Water

Regardless of if you remember or even rewatched the 2009 original, Avatar was quite the technological marvel upon release. The setting, scenery, fauna, flora, and native folk were so well made through CGI that you felt like you were there in Pandora. The tech helped Cameron to create a phenomenal cinematic experience worthy of earning – upon a second run – a record $2.9 billion. Now, there's a second one.

Last year welcomed a sequel 13 years after the first with Avatar: The Way of Water. Once again, while the story and characters were uninspired – mostly ripping or retreading from the first, which already did that with other movies – the tech in play offered an unrivaled level of immersion. Powering the $2.3 billion flick were brand-new Sony Venice cameras to create a stereoscopic 3D system and advanced AI and algorithms to build the characters and creatures on-screen.

In some of Cameron's biggest, most successful, and most impactful movies to date, he found new tech solutions to make his vision come to life. It could be argued that it's this development of cinematic tech that has made him one of the all-time greats.

Lesley Montoya

Update 28 July 2023