Why Was 'The Abyss' a Flop?

“Welcome to my nightmare!” This was how James Cameron greeted his cast when they first arrived on the Gaffney, South Carolina, set of The Abyss. The director has said that’s how he always welcomes his actors, but in the case of his 1989 film, the salutation happened to be true. By the time the cast arrived, Cameron was already way behind schedule. He had built a massive underwater set in the containment unit of an abandoned nuclear reactor, filling it with 7.5 million gallons of water; he had trained his cast to withstand a shoot that would take place largely underwater, requiring them to be in scuba gear for hours and hours at a time; he was also attempting to revolutionize special effects, with elaborate use of then-nascent, soon-to-be-revolutionary computer-generated imagery (CGI). The Abyss was an unprecedented production, and it came with unprecedented problems.