A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Does Disney own the movie Titanic now? James Cameron’s 1997 film was the most expensive motion picture of its day; its unprecedented $200 million budget was so large that Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment had to team up with two major studios to get his film made and distributed. The two studios that stepped up to the plate were Paramount Pictures (a subsidiary of Viacom) and 20th Century Fox Film Corporation (a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation). Though it might seem strange that two rival studios would join forces to produce and release a major motion picture, it has happened several times, most notably when Universal Pictures and Columbia Pictures bankrolled Steven Spielberg’s  1941  back in the late 1970s. What usually happens in these deals is that one studio gets the rights for domestic distribution, while the other gets the foreign distribution rights. In the case of  Titanic,  Paramount Pictures got dibs on the lucrative North Amer...

Avatar (2009) Written and directed by James Cameron Starring: Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Zoe Saldana Although writer-director James Cameron didn't exactly vanish into thin air after his 1997 boffo hit  Titanic  earned a roomful of Oscars and a small bank's worth of box office "take," it seemed that the guy had gone off into a Howard Hughes-like state of reclusion, at least artistically speaking. Of course, Cameron did  not  retire to some Pacific Ocean island to sip mai-tais and bask on a sun-soaked beach; he has been quite active making documentaries, producing TV series ( Dark Angel ) and prepping quite a few movie projects, including two sequels to Avatar. His 2009 science-fiction movie,  Avatar, was Cameron's first feature film in 12 years.  Like Titanic , it was very expensive to make ($230 million), partly because Cameron had to develop new computer graphic techniques, and partly because of the ambitious s...