James Cameron has never and will never be in the business of giving a f*ck what anybody else thinks, with the Avatar: The Way of Water director doing a terrible job of claiming he’s not going out of his way to blast the Marvel Cinematic Universe on the promotional circuit for his long-awaited sci-fi sequel.
Of course, when you’re the brains behind the highest-grossing movie in the history of cinema, a three-time Academy Award winner, and the visionary responsible for such classics as The Terminator, T2, Aliens, True Lies, and Titanic, you’ve pretty much earned the right to say whatever you want about anything film-related.
True to form, Cameron was speaking to Digital Spy about the narrative and dramatic stakes that anchor The Way of Water, and claimed that he wasn’t setting out to attack superhero blockbusters – before doing just that.
“We want to surprise. We want to engage you, and then we want to surprise you so that you don’t know what’s going to happen next. So that, okay, maybe somebody could die. Maybe there are real stakes here. I don’t want to attack superhero movies, I love superhero movies, but you know they’re not going to kill off Spider-Man. Or if they do, it’s going to be some multiverse bullshit, to go back through time and fix it all. You know, there’s never real stakes there. It’s okay. It’s great. I love those films. But I wanted real stakes. I wanted mortality to be real.”
Clearly, Cameron is no fan of what he perceives to be “multiverse bullshit,” but it isn’t exactly the first time he’s shaded the MCU. His famed no-frills approach has been ruffling feathers for decades, so nobody’s really surprised at this stage to hear him promise that he’s not deliberately blasting costumed crimefighters, only for the next words out of his mouth to do the exact opposite.