Box Office Banzai

"Jim Cameron has a huge following in Japan,” says Sonoko Sakai, VP of the U.S. office for Nippon Herald, which distributes films from Cameron's Lightstorm Entertainment company in that country. "He is considered a star director. His films have universal appeal.”

Kassar, who produced “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” built his company largely on the premise of exporting entertainment to the global market. Of Cameron he says that the director-writer-producer "chooses topics of interest to [people in] any country in the world,” and Kassar lauds the special effects and action components of Cameron's films.

With "True Lies,” Cameron man aged to mix his trademark action with touches of humor in a way that worked for overseas audiences – no small feat. “In Japan, comedy is a very tricky thing,” explains Sakai, "and doesn't always translate well (from other countries). When we did our sneaks of `True Lies,' we had people applauding and laughing at the end of the movie. And you don't get that in Japan. Japanese people tend to be very formal. But they really warmed to Jim's humor.”

Warmed to the tune of a toasty US$53-million gross (US$35 million in rentals), making the film in f994 second only to Carolco's "Cliffhanger,” which notched the US$40-million mark. The December '93 release of "Cliffhanger," however, had a lengthy head start on “True Lies," which came out in the fall of '94.

That said, Cameron's film represents the most successful foreign-language feature in Nippon Herald's 35-year history, Sakai points out. The film grossed $146 million on Cameron's home turf, pulling in a total of $214 million overseas to date.

“His films gross more outside the United States and Canada,” says MCA Motion Picture Group chairman Tom Pollock, whose Universal Pictures represents Lightstorm in a variety of territories. That's because, Pollock posits, "Cameron is a highly visual director. His films don't depend solely on the written language. They use filmic language.”

Like Nippon Herald and Universal, Twentieth Century Fox enjoys an association with Lightstorm in territories that include North America and France. “Jim Cameron to me is a genius,” exhorts senior executive VP Tom Sherak, who couldn't be happier with the arrangement. "No detail is too small to escape his notice, and no one is harder on himself than he is. He could be reviewing the dailies and it could be great, and [for him] it's not good enough.”

But Cameron's job on films he directs as well as those he simply produces, as with the upcoming "Strange Days,” doesn't end with making great movies. "With him it's a given that the work begins when you deliver a film," says ICM chairman and CEO Jeff Berg, Cameron's former agent. "He actively works with distributors and exhibitors not only on the domestic side but on the foreign side as well."

Cameron has taken the filmgoing experience to another level, according to Howard Lichtman, executive vp of marketing and communications at Cineplex Odeon, and this makes his movies among the most eagerly anticipated. “When you think of James Cameron, you think of a pleasure ride, of adventure. And this is somebody who's not afraid to tread where no one has gone before. He's not afraid of new innovations and new technologies.”

Dan Harkins, who owns 79 screens in the Phoenix, Ariz., area, associates Cameron with "muscular special effects, humongous blockbuster hits, summertime, popcorn, lines around the theater and a $100-million gross in three weeks." He adds that Cameron is “responsible for more of the biggest opening weekends in the last 10 years than almost any other director,” citing "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," 'The Abyss,” "Aliens” and “True Lies” as all bowing in the eight-figure range. “T2" averaged more than $10 million a day domestically in its record-shattering five-day holiday opening and went on to gross $204.8 million in the United States and Canada. It remains TriStar's highest-grossing picture. “True Lies” went on to open at No. l with "a pulverizing” $26-million weekend at the domestic boxoffice. It went on to accrue a total of $146 million domestically, according to The Hollywood Reporter boxoffice analyst A.D. Murphy, who notes that "True Lies" was one of eight $100-million-plus summer films of 1994.

"We take the view that if a film does $100 million plus in America, it's a big film,” says Stuart Francis, marketing executive of Odeon Cinema, the United Kingdom's second-largest theater chain after MGM International Cinemas. "If a film does over 10 million pounds here, we consider it to be a significant film. 'True Lies' did 14 million pounds, so it was a highly successful film.”

MGM International's chairman William Doeren concurs: "'True Lies' was a very big picture here in the United Kingdom."

Cameron's biggest challenge will perhaps be to continually outdo himself in a business where exhibitors and distributors are in the habit of judging each new release in relation to the boxoffice performance of its predecessors. But with his uncanny knack for upping the ante, Cameron gives the impression that he is a filmmaker who hasn't shown his full hand.

As this year's NATO/ShoWest Producer of the Year, Cameron is not the first artist to be honored in two categories (he nabbed NATO's Director of the Year award in 1986 for "Aliens"), but he is one of the few to be honored at a time when his career seems nowhere near its peak.

"He sees the future," says Sherak. Perhaps, more accurately, James Cameron is the future.