James Cameron Hopes Avengers Fatigue Sets In, Compares Avatar 2 to Godfather

James Cameron says that he’s hoping superhero fatigue sets in in a new interview, saying he hopes Hollywood finds some non-Avengers stories to tell. Cameron spoke with press promoting his new AMC series James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction (per IndieWire) and weighed in on the superhero genre.

“I’m hoping we’ll start getting Avenger fatigue here pretty soon. 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!”

Cameron also discussed his upcoming Avatar sequel, comparing it to another famous film franchise, albeit in a different genre.

“So it’s The Godfather,” he said. “Obviously a very different genre [and] a very different story, but I got intrigued by that idea, so that’s really what it is. It’s a generational family saga very different than the first film. Now, it’s the same type of settings and the same sort of respect for that shock of the new that we want to show you things that not only that you haven’t seen, but you haven’t imagined. It’s a continuation of the same characters, but what happens when warriors, willing to go on suicide charges and leap off cliffs on to the backs of big orange Toruks, grow up and have their own kids. Now the kids are the change makers. It’s interesting. Everyone is either a parent or they had parents at the very least. If you look at the big successful franchises now they are pretty much uninterested in it. So this could be the seeds of utter damnation and doom for the project or could be the thing that makes it stand apart and continue to be unique. Nobody knows until you make the movie and put it out. Anyone who thinks this is easy or they are just printing money over there at the Avatar studio, it doesn’t work that way.”

Cameron said of his plans for the upcoming Terminator reboot, which will be a direct sequel from T2: Judgment Day and be directed by Tim Miller, “We are looking at it differently than when I wrote the first story in 1982. That was just a classic sort of ‘technology bad, smart computers bad’ kind of thing. It’s got to be a much more nuanced perspective now I think, and hopefully we’ll show that ‘smart computers bad but…’ is the new motif. [laughs]”