At this point, it’s pretty hard to argue that James Cameron isn’t an absolutely incredible filmmaker. He has three of the highest-grossing movies of all time as evidence that he clearly understands his audience, and so maybe it isn’t that wild that he recently compared Avatar to Lord of the Rings, not simply Peter Jackson’s film adaptations, but J.R.R. Tolkien’s original novels as well.
Cameron is in the middle of an undertaking that is, to be fair, something that is at least in the same neighborhood as Peter Jackson’s production of The Lord of the Rings. Jackson made three movies essentially simultaneously, and Cameron did the same with two (and a bit) Avatar films. However, speaking with Time, Cameron points out that Jackson at least had a set of three novels he could use to base his work on. Whereas Avatar was something Cameron needed to write himself. He explains…
I was trying to do a simulation of, OK, I’m Peter Jackson making Lord of the Rings except Lord of the Rings doesn’t exist yet, so I need to go be Tolkien and create Lord of the Rings, and then I can go be Peter Jackson.
James Cameron is many things but modest has never been one of them. To be fair, he’s not necessarily claiming that Avatar is on par with Lord of the Rings when it comes to its importance, at least not yet. He’s saying that what he was doing was on that scale, and that much at least is hard not to agree with.
And the truth is that James Cameron at least realizes what he’s sort of saying with this comparison to both Lord of the Rings productions, the books, and the films. The big reason that the Avatar sequels took as long as they did according to Cameron was that the writing process was long and complex. If he’d been adapting existing books, we probably would have seen these movies sooner. Cameron said…
A little bit cheeky and ambitious. But I wasn’t adapting some big pantheon of books that existed. I had to go do that.
The quality of the work will likely be debated for decades to come. The scale of it really cannot be. James Cameron certainly has done an incredible amount of work to finally bring these Avatar sequels to life. And the fact that the movie is now the third highest-grossing film of all time says all that needs to be said about its cultural importance, at least at this moment.
Whether Avatar will even be looked at in the same way that Lord of the RIngs is, only time will tell. It may likely depend on the production of the next two Avatar movies, because Cameron has another big undertaking to complete before his own magnum opus is complete.
