Do we like James Cameron?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful in his recent record and some real good, but a contested old comment and a self-admitted bossy streak keep him off the top shelf.
Cameron is a Canadian-born director who built a career on enormous, technically ambitious films: The Terminator, Titanic, Avatar. His latest, Avatar: Fire and Ash, crossed US$1 billion worldwide within weeks of release, and he is still planning more Avatar films. Nobody's disputing the man can pack a cinema.
The newest stoush is the one that matters now. Actress Q'orianka Kilcher alleges in a May 2026 suit that Cameron's team used facial features from a photo of her at 14 to shape Neytiri, without asking or paying her. She also says she was given a signed Neytiri sketch years later. Representatives for Cameron and Disney hadn't responded when the story ran, and none of it has been tested in court.
On set, Cameron has a reputation for being a hard taskmaster. He dismisses claims he was ever cruel, but has called himself a “tinpot dictator” and admits he “could've been less autocratic”. That's a bloke owning his bossiness rather than hiding it, which counts for something.
When actor Eliza Dushku alleged in 2018 that a True Lies stunt coordinator had molested her on that film's set, the accused man adamantly denied it. Cameron said he knew nothing of it at the time and that there would have been “no mercy” had he known. He also called for safe ways for people to report abuse across the industry.
On the harm test, we found no campaigning against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet from him, and nothing on trans issues either way. His one real mark is a 2010 Guardian interview in which he reportedly called the Lakota “hopeless”, which Indigenous critics raised again around The Way of Water, along with complaints about white-saviour storytelling and casting. He has said the important thing is to listen, though we couldn't open the original for that line.
On politics, he called Donald Trump's return to office “horrific” and “horrifying”, said he saw “a turn away from everything decent”, and in 2025 said his New Zealand citizenship was imminent. He has also called generative AI performances “horrifying” and backs human actors. Where you land on his views depends on whether you read that as principled or as a rich bloke venting.