(Photo by 20th Century-Fox/Courtesy Everett Collection)
All James Cameron Movies Ranked
For James Cameron, it all started with a severed arm and some maggots. He was art director on Roger Corman’s Piranha II: The Spawning and, for one special effect, thought to “motivate” some live maggots into movement in a prosthetic arm by shocking the prop with a live electrical cable. This helped him get promoted to director on Piranha II, setting in motion a career associated with groundbreaking sci-fi and genre movies.
Cameron has long since disavowed his Piranha experience — he was only “director” for less than three weeks and didn’t have access to dailies or the editing room — paving the way to claim The Terminator as his feature debut, which we admit looks slightly better on a resume. And in this story of time-travelin’ cyborgs run amuck, we already see one of Cameron’s core fascinations: the frequently fatal conflict between man and technology, and the way it cuts off our own humanity (ironically told using state-of-the-art special FX), as seen in later movies like T2: Judgment Day, The Abyss, and Avatar. The success of the first Terminator got him into the major studio system with a gig directing Aliens, which also further cemented his reputation of creating hardened female protagonists.
By the ’90s, Cameron had the freedom to indulge in his obsessions, including ocean exploration, which produced Best Picture phenom Titanic (only the highest-grossing movie ever at one point) and two documentaries, Ghosts of the Abyss and Aliens of the Deep. He returned to narrative filmmaking with Avatar (only the highest-grossing movie ever at one point), and though he didn’t release a movie in the 2010s, it’s going to be Avatar that will carry him and us through the 2020s: No less than 4 sequels are planned for this decade, with The Way of Water in 2022, and Fire and Ash in 2025.
The Terminator (1984)
100%
89%
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Aliens (1986)
94%
94%
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Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
91%
95%
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The Abyss (1989)
89%
83%
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Titanic (1997)
88%
69%
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Aliens of the Deep (2005)
84%
48%
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Avatar (2009)
81%
82%
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Ghosts of the Abyss (2003)
80%
67%
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Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)
76%
92%
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True Lies (1994)
70%
76%
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