To say that James Cameron has been busy since 1997’s Titanic became the highest-grossing movie of all time is an understatement.
Over a decade later the acclaimed filmmaker pushed the boundaries of new technology with his 3-D sci-fi epic Avatar, which topped his disaster movie as the biggest ever with almost $3 billion worldwide.
Having briefly been eclipsed by Avengers Endgame, the behemoth has since retaken the top spot and remains there to his day.
Since then, the billionaire Canadian has been working on his four Avatar sequels, with the first Avatar: The Way of Water hitting cinemas in 2022 and becoming the third highest-grossing film of all time with $2.3 billion.
Avatar: Fire and Ash is set to follow in 2025, then Avatar 4 in 2029 and Avatar 5 in 2031, but Cameron has now announced that he still has time to fit in a new World War II movie.
Cameron’s Last Train From Hiroshima, his first non-Avatar movie since 1997’s Titanic, will shoot “as soon as Avatar production permits”. This could mean as late as the early 2030s, but we’d presume he’ll manage to fit it in at some point before then. After all, he’s also planning on handing the baton of Avatar 6 and 7 to another director.
So what’s the World War II movie about? It follows the true story of a man who in 1945 survived the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the US to force Japanese surrender, got a train to Nagasaki and survived that second nuclear explosion too. The film will be based on two of Charles Pellegrino’s non-fiction works: 2015’s To Hell and Back: The Last Train to Hiroshima and next year’s Ghosts of Hiroshima.
The books feature eyewitness accounts by those who experienced the only two nuclear bombs ever used in warfare. Both were developed by American theoretical physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, as depicted in Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-winning movie. The latter director had hoped another filmmaker would capture the Japanese side of the story – when between 150,000 and 246,000 were killed in the atomic blasts – and it looks like Cameron is the man for the job.
Not only has he had the fear of nuclear war on his mind since witnessing the Cuban Missile Crisis at age eight, but he directed two Terminator movies which deeply explored this terror. On top of that, he even met the man that his upcoming World War II film is about, just days before he died at 93 in 2010.
Speaking with Deadline, Cameron said: “It’s a subject that I’ve wanted to do a film about, that I’ve been wrestling with how to do it, over the years. I met Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a survivor of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just days before he died. He was in the hospital. He was handing the baton of his personal story to us, so I have to do it. I can’t turn away from it.”
During his visit with the Japanese man, both the director and Pellegrino promised to “pass on his unique and harrowing experience to future generations.”
Considering the heightened tensions between the US and Russia over the Ukrainian conflict, and the fact that the Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds to midnight is the closest the Atomics Scientists’ bulletin has ever been to apocalypse, both Oppenheimer and Last Train to Hiroshima couldn’t be more timely and relevant.