So James Cameron's
Avatar is on its way to becoming
the highest grossing movie in cinema history, displacing the previous record-holder of 12 years, James Cameron's
Titanic. That Cameron guy sure has a knack at the box office; factoring in
Terminator 2 and
True Lies, Cameron's last four major motions pictures have raked in a little over
$4 billion -- and that's before you count ancillary merchandising, home video, and television rebroadcast profits. It also ignores the added tally of the original
Terminator,
The Abyss, and
Aliens, all of whom were arguably superior movies -- aesthetically speaking, if not financially -- than Cameron's more contemporary cash cows.
What's funny about Cameron's success is that, for all his ability to push the visual envelope and expertly depict even the most pedestrian of storylines (*COUGH*Titanic*COUGH*Avatar*COUGHCOUGH*), he's begun to develop a rep as the guy who steals all his ideas. The most famous example is the Terminator franchise, which owes great steaming piles of mea culpa to one
Harlan Ellison, who just happens to be one of the most iconic sci-fi scribes of the 20th century.
The Terminator shared a number of explicit plot points and story ideas with a couple of classic
Outer Limits episodes written by Ellison: "
Demon With a Glass Hand" and "
Soldier".
Now, Ellison is infamous for being both contentious and litigious -- he earned as much notoriety for quarrelling with Gene Roddenberry, for whom he wrote arguably the greatest original
Star Trek episode ever, "
City on the Edge of Forever", than he did for his actual writing -- so it's little wonder that Cameron found himself taking some heat from Ellison over
The Terminator. What's surprising is that Ellison's case was strong enough that Cameron caved, and the Terminator film and franchise now appear with the following phrase in their credits: "Acknowledgment to the works of Harlan Ellison."
If the Ellison affair was an isolated incident, we'd be apt to let it go and probably even chalk it up to Ellison being easier to buy off than fight off. But there have been
questions raised about the unacknowledged inspiration for Avatar, too. No, we're not talking about
Dances With Wolves, though that parallel is explicit. Poul Anderson's novella
Call Me Joe follows the story of a paraplegic who connects his mind to a genetically engineered lifeform to explore a harsh planet and then ends up going native. Sound familiar?
Here's where it gets really funny. There's another billion-dollar movie franchise that Cameron wanted to direct but for which he couldn't secure the legal rights. For once, lack of ownership actually
stopped Cameron from making the movie, even if it didn't stop him from writing a script treatment for the property. Moreover, when the movie finally got made -- and became an international phenomenon -- there were some very vague similarities between Cameron's script treatment and the finished product, so much so that Cameron felt "slighted" that his previous work wasn't acknowledged. Ironic, isn't it. So, you gotta ask:
What billion-dollar movie franchise did James Cameron NOT create, but want a writing credit for?
