For James Cameron, blockbusters must divide their cost by two to survive
The director of Avatar relies on AI to reduce the huge sums spent in VFX.
Fortunately Minecraft is there! If the blockbuster drawn from video games has succeeded in the big box of 2025 so far, the year cinema has currently been gloomy at the box office, with a pack of blockbusters that have underperformed. Of Mickey 17 has Snow White by the way Captain America 4most of these very large drum films will have to hope for huge VOD income and derivative products to hope to be profitable. Because producing a film at 200 million dollars or more becomes almost impossible to monetize for Hollywood, in the current context.
The box office pope is himself aware of this. And James Cameron is not the type to look at the industry from the top of its ivory tower, without trying to provide solutions. For the director ofAvatar And Titanicnot always looking at spending, studios must learn to spend less to earn more. And there is a very effective way to achieve it today: AI!
In a recent podcast, James Cameron Put their feet in the dish and evoke the future of large spectacle cinema through technical and financial means: how to continue to produce visually breathtaking films without exploding budgets? According to him, this involves a drastic reduction in the costs of digital special effects (VFX). Ideally, it would be necessary to be able to divide by two the amount of these expenses which have become exorbitant. And artificial intelligence could well play a key role in this revolution.
In September 2024, James Cameron decided to get on the AI train and joined the board of directors of Stability AI, a company behind the famous model of stable images Diffusion: “Before, I would have set up my own box for that ” Smiles the filmmaker, who had created Lightstorm Entertainment, his own VFX company, from 1990. “But I learned that this may not be the best way to do. So I said to myself: OK, I will join a solid, competitive business, with real results. My goal is not to make a maximum of money. What I want is to understand this field, know what developers have in mind. What are their priorities? Their development cycle? What resources are necessary to create a tailor-made model?
And it’s not just a theoretical reflection. For Cameron, the very survival of cinema and popcorn movies at very high spectacle
“”If we want to continue to see these kinds of films, it is absolutely necessary to divide the costs by two. But beware, it is not a question of turning half of the teams in special effects studios“He tempers, knowing very well that this kind of statement could lead to a shield raising.”The idea is to double their speed of execution on a given sequence, to accelerate the pace of production, so that artists can chain creative projects, one after the other. That’s my vision. “
If James Cameron is closely interested in artificial intelligence, it remains categorical on one point: it should in no case replace human creators. For him, AI has its place in Hollywood, but only as a tool to lighten the workload of the teams, not to oust them. In an interview with CTV News in 2024, he said he did not believe “That a disembodied spirit, which only regurgitates what other incarnated minds have said – on life, on love, lying, fear, death – and which spit out all this in the form of a word salad – can one day move an audience. You have to be human to write that. I do not know anyone who is seriously planning to let an AI write a script. “
James Cameron is currently completing the post-production of Avatar: Fire & Ashthe next installment in his saga, whose release is scheduled for December 2025 in the cinema.
