Your audience has risen against you.
Your audience has risen against you.
E ven in liberal Hollywood, James Cameron stands out as one of the most “woke” directors. His Avatar movies deplore how a pristine ecosystem is despoiled by “settlers” and applaud the “indigenous resistance” fighting them.
So it’s deliciously ironic that Cameron is now facing fierce local resistance to his support for a giant film studio and training center in the pastoral British countryside. It would cost nearly $1 billion and feature half a million square feet of soundstages.
Cameron has suggested the project form the base for his production company, Lightstorm3D. “The 22.5 percent of total global box office the U.K. delivered in 2023 will grow as a result,” he reportedly wrote in a pitch for the project. “But embracing that opportunity necessitates support and boldness in thinking.”
But local NIMBY activists aren’t into “boldness in thinking.” They claim that Cameron’s project “would forever destroy” the local “Greenbelt” and be “detrimental to the people living in the area, destroying their quality of life by being surrounded and trapped by the industrial-scale development.” Although the proposed site for the project is a former quarry, it is zoned as greenbelt land, an area of open land around a city in which building is restricted.
This month, a local parish poll was held in Buckinghamshire on the project, and, in a low turnout, 85 percent of those who voted opposed the film studio. The local council, which has delayed a decision on the project, appears unlikely to move forward anytime soon.
Propaganda has consequences. If you make movies that decry development, don’t be surprised if impressionable filmgoers aren’t thrilled with your own building plans. Cameron should understand that. After all, when he made Avatar: The Way of Water, he shouted down criticism that only plant-based food would be served on his set by saying: “We have to live our lives, as the people working on this film, consistent with the message of the films.”
He even sneered at his critics in an interview with Time: “We couldn’t lecture oil companies and turn around and eat hamburgers.”
But apparently, it’s completely consistent to spend hundreds of millions of dollars making blockbusters decrying economic development and then propose a massive building project in the British countryside.
Make no mistake. Cameron is no ordinary environmentalist trying to balance nature with the needs of humans. He is a wild-eyed extremist. In his interview with Time, he praised the fact that other movies — such as 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War — have made climate change central to their plotlines.
Still, Time’s reporter wondered if Cameron was comfortable with the fact that Infinity’s plot features a villain who is so obsessed with the earth’s depletion of resources that he uses magic to snap his fingers and demolish half of all life in the universe. “I can relate to Thanos,” Cameron responded. “I thought he had a pretty viable answer. The problem is nobody is going to put up their hand to volunteer to be the half that has to go.”
On reading that twaddle, the residents of bucolic Buckinghamshire might be moved to comment: “We’d like you, James Cameron, to volunteer to take your $1 billion movie studio somewhere else.”