James Cameron's Net Worth is a Titanic
There are two sides to James Cameron. The first one is the movie producer/director/writer with a net worth of around $700 million.
James Cameron’s net worth comes from some of the most successful films of all time. That is the Hollywood version. The other side is an adventurer/explorer who wants to help protect our oceans and save the coral reefs from permanent harm and complete eradication. Both sides of James Cameron are fascinating.
The “Hollywood” James Cameron
Having made my career in the movie business, mostly doing the advertising campaigns for films, I know of the Hollywood James Cameron as a top producer, director, most importantly an excellent writer. He is both a technologist and a person who understands the human condition. His screenwriting is as good as it gets.
I appreciated his choice of Billy Zane to play the bad guy in the Titanic. It is the best role Billy played so far. Billy is an acquaintance of mine. He is one of the nicest people I know. All actors will tell you that the most fun roles to play are the bad guy. I thought he did an exceptional job of playing the character of Caledon Hockley, engaged to be married to Rose DeWitt Bukater. That is the woman, played by Kate Winslet, who is the focus of the film. On the trip, she falls for the character Jack Dawson, played by Leonardo DiCaprio.
It must be many women’s fantasy to have the choice between Billy Zane and Leonardo DiCaprio as a lover. Titanic boosted DiCaprio’s already stellar reputation as an actor and helped turn him into the highest net worth actor in the film. Leonardo DiCaprio’s net worth is about $245 million, still less than half James Cameron’s net worth.
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The Humble Beginnings Of James Cameron’s Net Worth
The first movie that James Cameron’s directed was a sequel called Piranha II: The Spawning released in 1981. It was a low-budget direct-to-video release made for $145,786. At the time, James was working as a special effect guy for low-budget filmmaker Roger Corman. Corman is famous for his cheap blood and guts cult films like Toxic Avenger and for allowing many people to gain their entry into the movie-making business.
Cameron got the director job for Piranha II when the producer, Ovidio G. Assonitis, fired the other director working on the film. Cameron was a fill-in who did not get to exercise any creative control over the project. Assonitis who is Italian-Greek hired an Italian-speaking film crew so Cameron could not even communicate with them. Certainly, this was not Cameron’s best work and the film is horrible. It bombed at the box office doing nothing to help James Cameron’s net worth.
Cameron says he only worked on a film for two and one-half weeks when he lost the job. The producer Assonitis kept Cameron’s name on the film as the director because the delivery contract required an American director. At that time, Cameron was broke and sleeping on a friend’s couch in Pomona, California.
The Miracle Of The Terminator
Image source: medium.com
Honestly, I do not know how James made the jump to write and direct his next film, which was The Terminator released in 1984. He made it with a budget of $6.4 million. John Daly and Derek Gibson of Hemdale Film Corporation were able to get the film financed even though it was for a first-time writer/director James Cameron. This kind of big break makes movie history. It does happen but winning the lottery is easier. This foundation helped build James Cameron’s net worth.
Worldwide Success
The Terminator is truly Cameron’s first feature film where he exercised creative control and it shows. It made $78.3 million at the box office even though it released in October and was not a blockbuster release that usually happens during summertime. The film created an extremely valuable franchise that led to more films, a television series, comic books, video games, and huge merchandising. It propelled Cameron’s film career forward into the stratosphere and made Arnold Schwarzenegger the top male action star. The Terminator franchise made Schwarzenegger’s net worth climb like the Mission Impossible franchise has done for one of the richest actors, Tom Cruise.
Aliens
After proving his director skills with The Terminator, James Cameron went on to do even more outstanding projects. The next Cameron project, released in 1986, was Aliens. Cameron also wrote the screenplay for Aliens. Cameron had his work cut out for him because Ridley Scott directed the original Alien released in 1979 and Aliens was the sequel.
In Hollywood, it is not easy to follow a successful film with a successful sequel. Expectations are so high and it is easy to produce a second film not a good as the first one or even a complete flop. Not so, with James Cameron's efforts. Aliens was produced for a budget of $18 million and earned over $183 million at the box office.
Cameron worked with Producer Gale Anne Hurd to make the film. Aliens was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won two for Sounds Effects and Visual Effects. Sigourney Weaver was nominated for Best Actress but did not win the Oscar. The film won eight Saturn Awards (given to the best science fiction films). Cameron won the Saturn Awards for Best Direction and Best Writing. Many consider Aliens to be the best sequel ever made.
Falling Down The Abyss
Working again with producer Gale Anne Hurd, Cameron wrote and directed The Abyss. Cameron fell in love with Gale Hurd while working with her on Aliens. They married in 1985. He wrote the character of Lindsey in the film based on her. They were already married before The Abyss, then they separated during pre-production, and then they got divorced during the month of February in 1989, just two months after principal photography for The Abyss wrapped. One could say their marriage got lost in an abyss.
Bad On-Set Environment
Shooting The Abyss was a nightmare. Cameron is a perfectionist. His work is very slow and deliberate with little regard for how other people feel about it. He acts like a dictator and pushes everyone very hard. He literally drives people who work for him to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
During part of the shooting of The Abyss, the cast and crew were on an isolated set in South Carolina working six days a week for 12 hours days for six months. They finally had enough and created a kind of riot, throwing furniture out the windows of dressing rooms, smashing the room walls, and breaking the windows. Sounds like something that wealthy actors like Mel Gibson, known for throwing tantrums, might do. He was not working on the film but I can imagine him doing something like that.
An actress in the film Elizabeth Mastrantonio stormed off the set screaming, “We are not animals!” Ed Harris who was also in the film had such a bad experience that he refuses to talk about the film and prefers to pretend it never happened. Cameron was fighting with his wife who was the film’s producer during this period as well.
The Abyss is a good film. The budget ran over to $47 million from the originally-budgeted $43 million. It did less than expected at the box office taking in around $90 million worldwide. It won an Academy Award for its Visual Effects.
The problem with the film is its ending. The producers became nervous about the film. They had Cameron re-shoot the ending before the film’s release. Cameron says there are at least four endings for that film. The ending selected by the producers is anti-climatic.
I’ll Be Back!
In 1991, Terminator 2: Judgment Day released. Cameron directed the film and is credited as the screenwriter along with William Wisher. This is when Cameron starts to see the really big bucks coming into his life. The film’s budget was $100 million. The box office topped $520 million. This sequel brought in five times the box office of the 1984 original Terminator film. At this point, Cameron participated in two franchises of Aliens and Terminator films. If you want to get super rich in Hollywood that is how to do it.
Schwarzenegger is Funny Too
Not resting on his laurels, Cameron released True Lies in 1994. It is an action comedy film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. It had a production budget of $100 million. The box office was close to $400 million thanks to the Schwarzenegger fans.
A Gigantic Budget For a Disaster Film
What James Cameron did next is legendary. The explorer/adventurer part of his makeup was a huge influence on this next project, which for a while stood as the film with the highest box office in history of $2.2 billion, only to be knocked off the top slot by another Cameron film, Avatar. BoxOfficeMojo says that now Avengers: Endgame is number one with Avatar second and Titanic third.
The production company was nervous because the production went way over budget. The cause of this was the adventure spirit of James Cameron in doing research on the sunken Titanic ship and his meticulous attention to detail. He built a replica of a huge part of the ship off the coast of Ensenada, Mexico that was so accurate that it could be a part of the real ship.
The producers were worried about the budget that went sky high to $200 million. No one knows for sure how big it really was. Cameron was rumored to pledge his Malibu house if the film failed to perform. He did give up his $8 million director’s fee in exchange for back-end profits and that one move made him over $650 million in income.
The producers did not have to worry. The film released in 1997 and the audience response was gigantic. That’s right you guessed it; it was Titanic! It is one of the greatest films of all time. The special effects are amazing. The historic sets are perfectly accurate down to the last details. The story was already well known so the audience awareness was very high. However, what James Cameron did that was astonishing was to make it a love story.
The Love Story
Image source: Egypt Today
No one can forget the scene with the character of Jack Dawson, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and the character of Rose Dewitt, played by Kate Winslet, when they are on the bow of the ship. They embrace near the edge with Jack Dawson holding her arms out and she says, “I’m flying!” or when Jack says, “I’m the king of the world!”
The film released on December 19, 1997, right before Christmas, which, as a marketing guy would say, was textbook perfect!
I thought James Cameron did a fantastic job directing Titanic with his attention to detail and the film’s accurate rendering of the famous ship; however, it was through the storytelling that he truly excelled. After all, the audience going into the movie theaters knew the ship would sink at the end of the film, and yet, James was able to infuse the story with a romantic love story. It has a very satisfying surprise ending that is deeply emotional.
I once had a discussion with Michael Harpster, who was president of marketing for New Line for decades. I asked him what makes a movie good. He replied, “If it makes you cry.” That is what James Cameron was able to achieve with the love story within the well-known historical story of the Titanic. The movie made the audience cry (including me).
The Explorer/Adventure Cameron
Although I worked in the movie business, I never worked with James Cameron. Instead, we met at a fundraising event to save the coral reefs because we both have a love for the adventure of diving and the ocean. BuzzFeed notes that James Cameron is doing everything he can to prevent the annihilation of the Great Barrier Reef with his efforts at the biospherefoundation.org and other non-profits working to save and restore coral reefs globally.
I’ve heard the horror stories about James being a dictator on the film set and frankly, I prefer to let that be a caricature of James. The James I know is a very kind sensitive man, who likes to hang out eating burritos at a small café in Malibu where he keeps his office. What we both like is going on adventures.
The Difference between Men and Boys Is the Price of Their Toys
I think he makes films because he secretly wants to have the massive budgets needed to make the toys he uses for exploration like deep-sea diving submarines. After all, he is one of the few people who went down to the depths of the Mariana Trench. After the success of Titanic, he had some fun. He made some documentaries with massive budgets for that genre of around $30 million each including Expedition: Bismark, Ghosts of the Abyss, and Aliens of the Deep. In Ghost of the Abyss, he visited the Titanic shipwreck in a specially-built underwater vehicle.
I was hanging around during this period and he was having lots of fun. He was hugging and kissing everyone at the wrap party for Ghosts of the Abyss. He was more relaxed that he must have been before when making these documentary films because the pressure on him was less.
I already admired James Cameron very much, for what he did with The Terminator, Aliens, and Titanic and then, in 2009, he released Avatar! Nobody was afraid to give James a big budget. Avatar’s production budget was $246 million. The box office was $2.8 billion. He deserves every penny of James Cameron’s net worth. I would like to see James Cameron’s net worth hit over $1 billion.
Conclusion
In case, you are wondering what James Cameron is up to at this moment. He is extending the Avatar franchise with Avatar 2 hitting the teathers at the end of 2022, Avatar 3 in 2023, Avatar 4 in 2025, and Avatar 5 in 2027. Another James Cameron first is that he is working on the four sequels at the same time. That should bump up James Cameron’s net worth. That was the original plan with the first Avatar to make a huge investment in a franchise that can make a series of films using advancements in digital effects and 3D graphics technology.
For casting, I hope he uses one of the richest celebrities, Morgan Freeman, who I really like, and my other favorite, Matthew McConaughey, who is now joining the group of actors that are high net worth individuals.
All I can say is, way to go James! That visit to the Marianna Trench was awesome. Fewer humans have visited there than landed on the moon. I do not want to work with James on a movie set, but I would be happy to show up for the wrap parties, and most importantly go diving with him anytime. I now live near one of the best freediving spots in the world at the Great Blue Hole (James come visit when you can and we will go to Isla Bonita).