Those Avatar movies aren’t going to last forever. When he has finished playing on Pandora, James Cameron has his next project already lined up. The uber-director and producer has bought the screen rights to Charles Pellegrino’s 2015 novel Last Train From Hiroshima, along with it’s not-yet-publisjhed follow-up Ghosts of Hiroshima.
According to a report in Deadline, Cameron will be working on these as soon as the Avatar universe is all wrapped up. This will be his first big screen outing that didn’t involve blue people since Titanic in 1997.
Last Train From Hiroshima tells the story of the world’s unluckiest man… of the luckiest, depending on how you look at things. It is the true story of a Japanese man during World War II who survived the atomic blast at Hiroshima… and then got on a train to Nagasaki.
In a statement, Cameron said:
“It’s a subject that I’ve wanted to do a film about, that I’ve been wrestling with how to do it, over the years. I met Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a survivor of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just days before he died. He was in the hospital. He was handing the baton of his personal story to us, so I have to do it. I can’t turn away from it.”
The book pulls together historical records and eyewitness accounts of both Japanese civilians on the ground and American airmen and tells a detailed story about the aftermath.
Cameron and Pellegrino have a long-standing relationship, with Pellegrino acting as a consultant on Titanic and Avatar.