Is there life beyond Avatar for blockbuster director James Cameron?

Reports surfaced this week that Cameron is poised to tackle a film adaptation of Charles R.

Pellegrino’s The Last Train from Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back. The book, a harrowing account of the survivors of the atomic bombings in 1945, includes eyewitness accounts from both the Japanese and American sides.

Cameron, who first optioned the book a decade and a half ago, told the Los Angeles Times: “We live in a more precarious world than we thought we did. I think the Hiroshima film would be as timely as ever, if not more so. It reminds people what these weapons really do when they’re used against human targets.

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As part of his long-standing interest in the project, Cameron reportedly paid a personal visit in 2010 to Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only person believed to have survived both the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, three days apart. The director has said that Pellegrino’s book is one of several sources he’d be drawing upon to recreate what happened in the air and on the ground on those fateful days.

Casting and production details for the proposed new film have not yet been announced.

The 70-year-old Cameron was born in Ontario, Canada and moved to southern California as a teenager. He made his first short film, Xenogenesis, in 1978. Inspired by Star Wars, he schooled himself in special-effects technology and worked on a number of sci-fi films of the early 1980s including Battle Beyond the Stars, Galaxy of Terror, and Android. After having a nightmare about a cyborg attack, he wrote the script for The Terminator, a 1984 release. His 1997 production, Titanic, became a huge critical and commercial success.

Meanwhile, Avatar: The Way Of Water continues to break box-office records. According to Variety, the blockbuster is now the third highest-grossing movie of all time, having sailed past Titanic. Several of Cameron’s offerings have each grossed well over $2 billion worldwide, including the two Avatar features, Titanic, and Avengers: Endgame.

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