Culture news James Cameron absolutely wanted to recruit this actor and not another for this action film: he threatened the studios to entrust his film to the competition
Before taking off for Pandora, James Cameron directed several films which each in their own way marked the History of Hollywood and sometimes even cinema as an Art. Despite his past successes, the Canadian filmmaker was forced to threaten these Hollywood studios in the mid-90s in order to hire a very specific actor for his film. ™action.
One Arnold can hide another
If today (in 2024) James Cameron finds himself at the top of the food chain in Hollywood after having placed three films (Avatar, Avatar: The Way of Water, Titanic) in the TOP 4 of the biggest box office hits – global office, this was not necessarily the case in the early 1990s. Crowned with the public, critical and financial success of Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), the director of Aliens Returns is tackling a brand new project rooted in a totally different genre.
Remake of the French film La Totale! by Claude Zidi, True Lies is an action comedy starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis (Everything Everywhere All at Once). To support these two stars, James Cameron wanted to hire Tom Arnold in the role of the sidekick, but this was not to the taste of 20th Century Fox. American studios have made it clear that they are opposed to this idea. James Cameron then threatened to give this film to Paramount.
During the podcast “James Cameron: An Oral History” broadcast on The Ringer website, presenter Alan Siegel interviewed several close associates of James Cameron to discover the secrets surrounding the successes of the director who in just nine films brought Hollywood to its feet. The second “Arnold” from True Lies (1994) then returned to the casting of True Lies and declared:
He came in and said, “We found the third guy after Arnold and Jamie Lee”… And he said, “It’s Tom Arnold.” And they said, “This is horrible news!” Jim replied: “No, I don’t read the tabloids. But I wrote this movie and it’s him. – Tom Arnold
The future of the Avatar saga
In December 2022, moviegoers returned to Pandora 13 long years after a first “Avatar” mission passed into posterity. The Way of the Water was a huge hit with 2.32 billion US dollars collected at the box office for a colossal budget (excluding marketing costs) estimated between 350 and 460 million. While Avatar 2 was still showing in theaters, the third part was already in production. James Cameron even confirmed that he would direct Avatar 4 and Avatar 5 before handing over Avatar 6 and Avatar 7 (if the films are ever produced).