James Cameron Cut 10 Minutes of Guns from Avatar 2, Says He Regrets Fetishizing Firearms In Movies

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When filmgoers hear the name James Cameron, their mind may travel to memories of blue aliens or the Titanic sinking or lots and lots of people and robots shooting off pretty big guns to take out everything from terrorists to aliens.

In an interview promoting his latest release, Avatar: The Way of Water, Cameron — who is outspoken on a number of liberal causes — expressed some regret over his reliance on firearms to sell movie tickets in the past. The director even said he shaved 10 minutes of gunplay out of his Avatar sequel, which runs over three hours, to reflect his new mindset on onscreen gun violence.

Cameron told Esquire Middle East:

“I actually cut about 10 minutes of the movie targeting gunplay action. I wanted to get rid of some of the ugliness, to find a balance between light and dark. You have to have conflict, of course. Violence and action are the same thing, depending on how you look at it. This is the dilemma of every action filmmaker, and I’m known as an action filmmaker.”

Cameron opened up further by suggesting his past films had fetishized “the gun” and he wouldn’t make some of them the same way today.

The director said:

I look back on some films that I’ve made, and I don’t know if I would want to make that film now. I don’t know if I would want to fetishize the gun, like I did on a couple of Terminator movies 30-plus years ago, in our current world. What’s happening with guns in our society turns my stomach.

The last Terminator movie Cameron was involved in — that included lots of gunplay — was 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate, which he helped write and produce.

Cameron said he’s happy today to be living in New Zealand, a country with much stricter gun laws than the U.S.