Hollywood Learned All the Wrong Lessons From 'Avatar'

When the director James Cameron was working on Avatar, he was holding the biggest bargaining chip imaginable. His last major feature, 1997’s Titanic, was the most successful film in Hollywood history, overcoming its budgetary woes and behind-the-scenes drama to become a box-office phenomenon unlike any other. Avatar was another risky bet in theory, an original sci-fi epic about nine-foot-tall blue aliens called the Na’vi who’d be rendered through advanced CGI and motion-capture technology. But still, this would be a James Cameron film—a fact the director said he had to remind the honchos of during production.