James Cameron, hard at work on his series of sequels to 2009’s sci-fi blockbuster Avatar, says the era of superhero movies should be coming to an end. With Avengers: Infinity War opening in theaters later this week, heralding a paradigm shift for the studio that launched the modern superhero franchise, Cameron hopes Hollywood’s major studios will soon find a new thing.
“I’m hoping we’ll start getting Avenger fatigue here pretty soon,” Cameron said while promoting his new docuseries AMC Visionaries: James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction. “Not that I don’t love the movies. It’s just, come on guys, there are other stories to tell besides hyper-gonadal males without families doing death-defying things for two hours and wrecking cities in the process. It’s like, oy!”
His new series, for which he is host and executive producer, premieres on April 30, and includes a number of interviews about the history and state of one of Hollywood’s most beloved genres from giants of the industry like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Ridley Scott, Christopher Nolan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Will Smith, and Sigourney Weaver.
“We can see the market drives us to a sort of science fiction now thats either completely escapist and doesn’t require a technical consultant — an example of that would be Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s just fun,” Cameron said. “We don’t care how those spaceships work or any of that stuff works. And then you have scientifically responsible science fiction like The Martian or Interstellar.”
He also spoke to reporters about his much-hyped sequels to Avatar, which beat out Cameron’s Titanic in its year to become the highest-grossing movie ever. The first film followed Jake Sully, a human sent to a faraway planet who learns the ways of its tribal native population by transferring his consciousness into a blue-skinned “avatar.”
“I’ve found myself as a father of five starting to think about what would an Avatar story be like if it was a family drama,” he told reporters. “What if it was The Godfather? It’s a generational family saga. That’s very different than the first film. There’s still the same setting and the same respect for the shock of the new. We still want to show you things that you haven’t even seen or imagined, but the story is very different. It’s a continuation of the same characters… but what happens when warriors who are willing to go on suicide charges and leap off cliffs, what happens when they grow up and have their own kids? It becomes a very different story.”
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