James Cameron is ready to cross over into double digits. When the third Avatar movie—a second sequel to one of the best James Cameron movies, Avatar—releases in December 2025, it will mark the tenth feature film he’s directed—and, arriving just three years after Avatar: The Way of Water, his shortest gap since the ‘90s, when Cameron movies arriving every three years was more or less the norm. The man isn’t a recluse; he’s just a perfectionist who spends ages on both the writing and filmmaking sides of his massive projects, which have surely reached the “most expensive movie ever made” mark more time than any other major director’s. Like a somewhat more productive George Lucas or an all-in-on-sci-fi Steven Spielberg, Cameron has refined and redefined the art of the Hollywood blockbuster—and despite the time he spends on every movie, he manages to make it look vastly easier than it likely is. As corny as his dialogue can be, Cameron is an action-movie structural genius, repeatedly making audiences wait for the fireworks as he carefully builds out his characters, conflicts, and worlds.
If that sounds a bit calculated, a bit engineered, it doesn’t really do justice to the emotional sincerity of so many Cameron pictures, whether it’s the T-800 learning to exhibit glimmers of humanity, Ripley charging in to challenge an alien queen to a grudge match, or Jack never even asking for Rose to move over on that door floating in the icy ocean, saving her life in the process. He’s also the rare tech-infatuated filmmaker who makes movies where tech plays major roles in the story itself; maybe that gives him that extra awareness of how to use machines creatively and thoughtfully.
So while it would be easy to say the best James Cameron movies are, well, all of them, let’s dig a little deeper and explore what separates the best ones from the merely very good or, yes, occasionally, the more questionable choices. Because Cameron has currently directed all of nine (9) feature films over the course of 40-plus years—the three additional Avatar sequels he has shot and/or planned may allow him to definitively pass Terence Malick and Stanley Kubrick, but that’s the degree of relative scarcity he’s backed himself into—this list will also include his official co-writing credits on three additional features, all of which enhance what he’s crafted during his time as Hollywood’s most ambitious spender of studio money.
12. Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985)
Before Cameron mastered the fine art of the big-budget sequel, with three of the best such undertakings of all time (two of which are frequently cited as exceptions to the rule that the sequels always step down from the original), he was involved with a couple of pretty bad ones. Granted, he only has a co-writing credit on the we-get-to-win-this-time follow-up to the terrific First Blood, but it’s still a mild blemish on the man’s record. Not financially, of course; this remains one of the biggest Sylvester Stallone hits ever. The second Rambo movie also sets the template for all of the other bad Rambo movies to come, converting the character from a psychologically complex Vietnam vet to a one-man war machine. According to Stallone himself, Cameron’s draft took longer to get to the action and had a tech-expert sidekick, both elements that could have helped ground the movie, or at least give it more of Cameron’s signature. As-is, it’s a look into what generic action trash might look like with Cameron giving set-piece suggestions from a distance. The answer: Still a lot like generic action trash.
11. Piranha II: The Spawning (1982)
In retrospect, it’s shocking that Piranha II represents the only James Cameron movie where characters attempt to have sex underwater. (Excuse me: the only James Cameron movie so far where characters attempt to have sex underwater. There are still at least three more Avatars to go, remember.) That’s actually the opening scene of this movie, one Cameron would prefer that we all forget; he fought to have his name taken off of it, and he claims to have only lasted two weeks into principal photography before getting fired. Others have disputed this, saying Cameron was there for the remainder of the shoot (after replacing another fired director); maybe they’re both right, and this movie only took a few weeks in the first place. Said movie is monster-movie sequel shlock (what if Jaws, but small and flying, so not that much like Jaws?), for sure, but at the same time, there are plenty of Cameron trademarks here: Copious underwater footage, scenes with red lighting, Lance Henriksen. (Less Cameron-y: the constant parade of female nudity.) It’s certainly bad, but honestly, as low-budget junk goes, it has a certain low-rent charm.
10. True Lies (1994)
Not only Cameron’s most divorced movie but perhaps the most divorced movie ever made, or at least the only one to gross over $350 million worldwide. One of two Cameron-directed films with no fantastical elements (unless you count Arnold Schwarzenegger automatically), True Lies riffs on James Bond movies casting Arnold as a smooth spy so undercover that even his own wife (Jamie Lee Curtis) thinks he’s a dull computer salesman. The movie opens with a spectacular series of nouveau-Bond action sequences, released during a fallow period for real Bond movies (GoldenEye wouldn’t come out until 1995), and ends with a spectacular (and, yes, fairly racist) progression of more traditionally Arnold-style villain-blasting and explosion-laden stunts. In between, well, at least Bill Paxton is there; he’s very funny as a sleazy car salesman who pretends to be the guy Schwarzenegger actually is, in an attempt to seduce Curtis—who is then terrified and humiliated as a form of revenge (and of course, Paxton’s character is duly punished, too). The whole comedy-of-remarriage portion of the film weirdly anticipates the aggressive, bullying tone of comic relief from Michael Bay movies, specifically; “not a good look,” as the kids say. But when the movie focuses on outlandish spycraft, eventually bringing Curtis in on the mission, it’s an actual blast, albeit with a sour aftertaste.
9. The Abyss (1989)
Another remarriage narrative, only with a far soppier soul than True Lies, both in terms of sentimentality and actual water, water, everywhere. Cameron’s first deep-sea expedition sends Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio into the briny deep to retrieve a submarine, reconcile their estranged relationship, and encounter an alien ship that—in Cameron’s special edition at least—has the potential to destroy life on Earth as punishment for its violence. At the time, The Abyss was something of a boondoggle, an expensive and difficult shoot that left the actors wrung out and the original release date delayed. It’s the only Cameron-directed movie that didn’t become a big hit and, perhaps not coincidentally, the one where Cameron’s revised version (completed free from test-audience second-guessing) has become most widely preferred. It does stretch the movie’s length to an Avatar-like 171 minutes; it also gives the film’s scope and spectacle more room to breathe alongside its love story. Whichever version you seek out, it’s largely terrific, with Oscar-winning visual effects and, despite the science fiction resolution, perhaps Cameron’s most purely process-heavy storytelling.
8. Strange Days (1995)
Cameron’s only credited collaboration with his former wife Kathryn Bigelow was, naturally, on her futuristic, violent, and slightly sappy sci-fi movie. This half-lost classic, which bombed hard in its original release, is the first of two examples of how Cameron sometimes feels more comfortable exploring harder-edged sci-fi concepts as a writer than as a director. (Wild that between the screenplays for this and True Lies, the latter was somehow what Cameron decided needed his personal touch.) Ralph Fiennes gives one of his best leading-man performances as Lenny, a dealer of realistic VR discs that pull viewers into the experiences of other people. This concept is the perfect vehicle for some noirish plotting, though Bigelow and Cameron flout noir convention by making the 145-minute version; in the genre’s heyday, this would have been 100 minutes, tops. Still, there are plenty of great actors and atmosphere to make the nearly two and a half hours well worth it.
7. Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)
It’s absolutely wild that a filmmaker could make something as successful and awe-inspiring as the second Avatar movie and still have it only be like the sixth-best movie he’s directed—and out of nine, not two or three dozen! That is to say that there’s nothing especially wrong with Avatar: The Way of Water, the astonishingly late follow-up to Cameron’s 2009 blockbuster. Despite a thirteen-year gap that managed to out-wait even the Titanic-to-Avatar timeline and a storyline that is explicitly about the children of the lead characters from the first movie, Way of Water never particularly feels like a legacy sequel, at least not in the getting-the-band-back-together sort of way. Cameron just jumps back into the world of Pandora, a far-off moon full of wondrous sights experienced by human-turned-native Jake Sully (Sam Worthington). Cameron is rightfully known as a tech innovator and inveterate tinkerer, but can we take a moment to appreciate how skillful he is at blending technology and old-fashioned performance? Sam Worthington, who made a relatively quick trip from buzzy Avatar leading man to supporting-actor utility player in the years following that movie’s release, is genuinely excellent in Way of Water, as is (less surprisingly, but still gratifyingly) Zoe Saldaña as Jake’s beloved Neytiri (just pretend her Oscar is for this one or the other Avatar). The sheer amount of time since the first movie put an extra burden on the sequel to serve as proof of concept for the idea of expanding this world into multiple films, and The Way of Water pulls that off before you even necessarily realize what it’s accomplished.
6. Alita: Battle Angel (2019)
Kicking around Cameron’s head long enough that it was floated as a possible Titanic follow-up, Alita finally got made and released under what should have been inauspicious circumstances in 2019: Directed by Desperado’s Robert Rodriguez, with Cameron credited as a screenplay co-writer and a lot of uncanny-valleyish visual effects that didn’t exist in the late ‘90s. While the movie only did OK business at the box office, it attracted the fanatical cult it richly deserves. Though there are plenty of scrappy Rodriguez touches—that bar fight sequence especially—the movie has all the hallmarks of the best James Cameron movies, too, from the long, character-building front section to the empathetic virtual performance from Rosa Salazar as the android with a heart of gold (not literally), as well as its spectacular back-half action sequences. At the same time, Cameron simply co-writing and producing the film frees it up from his obsessiveness; this feels like the most pure fun he’s had making a movie since maybe True Lies, with the added benefit of not being racist or misogynist as far as I can tell! It even has a potent trans-rights reading that has earned the movie some virulent fans, a graceful aging over the past six years, and even, apparently, a shot at a future sequel. Fingers crossed that Cameron’s clout is enough to make it happen.
5. The Terminator (1984)
I’m sure plenty of folks wish that Cameron had made three or four more movies with the scale and concision of The Terminator, a sci-fi horror-thriller that runs under two hours. I won’t go that far, and it’s probably telling that even in lean-and-mean mode, Cameron goes significantly over the 90-minute mark. But that only makes it more impressive that The Terminator’s tension and energy basically never flag, as a cyborg from the future (Arnold, obviously) arrives to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), the mother of future anti-robot revolutionary John Connor. Her only hope is the time-traveling human Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), who whisks her through a series of chases, shoot-outs, and close scrapes, one of which occurs at a club named after the made-up genre Cameron is operating in here: Tech Noir. Though its sequel goes bigger, broader, and more spectacular, there’s a rough-and-tumble immediacy to the original Terminator that often feels nightmarish, its sci-fi mythology melding with dream logic. It’s not so much that Cameron never made another movie this short; it’s that he’s never made something quite so memorably scary.
4. Avatar (2009)
Twelve years after his greatest triumph, Cameron took another big swing: a sci-fi fantasy set on a distant moon populated by, among other fantastical creatures, a race of blue, cat-like humanoids that are infiltrated by Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paralyzed military grunt who regains his lust for life in a new faux-alien body. He also falls in love with one of the natives and eventually defends Pandora against the interloping Earth soldiers hoping to mine the place for its resources. Unfortunately, none of us will live long enough to outlast the cracks about this being “Dances with Wolves in space” or “basically FernGully” or featuring “big Smurfs” or whatever other internet-comment snark amounts to “other things exist and I’m aware of them!” or sometimes even just “look, blue!” Avatar tells an archetypal story, but it’s also a visually imaginative (and largely anti-colonial!) big-screen trip unlike any other. (Rerelease FernGully in IMAX and see how many people show up for it.) Basically, Cameron went looking for unobtainium—and the crazy bastard found it.
3. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
It’s tempting to disregard blockbuster grosses and rank The Terminator higher—as alluded, the original is scarier, nastier, shorter, and all-around probably a lot cooler. But boy, does T2 kick ass on such a massive scale, to such a degree that its success made future sequels both inevitable and more or less impossible. That’s how good Cameron is at sequels: He did a Terminator 2 that, despite all appearances, secretly moots any future Terminator 3, 4, 5, etc. That didn’t stop various sequels (and one pretty good TV spinoff, really the only Terminator 2 follow-up worth a damn) from coming to pass, and it doesn’t diminish the power of Judgment Day. This is also the middle movie of three Cameron made with Arnold Schwarzenegger, forming pillars that hold up his big-screen career in a way that other directors probably couldn’t manage. Cameron took the former Conan the Barbarian to another level (The Terminator made as much as the first Conan with far less obvious trappings of old-school spectacle); made a sequel that turned him into one of the world’s biggest stars (Terminator 2 and Terminator 3 remain his biggest-grossing movies in the U.S.); and took him on a victory lap that extended his reign a bit further after the notorious Last Action Hero bomb (True Lies is still his third-biggest grosser after those Terminator sequels). T2, the middle movie of his Cameron trilogy, is the Arnold performance, doing everything he’s known for at once: robotic badassery, winking comedy, and, most unexpectedly, forming an emotional core in the midst of a lot of choice Cameron-choreographed mayhem. Not only is Terminator 2 the best Arnold Schwarzenegger movie; it’s the one that’s good enough to make anyone care what the best Arnold Schwarzenegger movie is.
2. Titanic (1997)
Can you believe that for a little while it was considered kinda cool to hate on Titanic? To talk about how L.A. Confidential was the Goodfellas to its Dances with Wolves? As a classic case of a filmmaker triumphing by leaning into what a lot of people consider his worst instincts—corny dialogue, sentimentality, supersized running time—Titanic is the sweetest, most open-hearted revenge ever assembled. For at least the third time in his career, Cameron made the most expensive movie of all time, one that contained not a single alien, killer robot, killer-turned-protector robot, machine gun, or Arnold. (It’s a movie made for fans of everyone’s favorite Cameron creation: the water from The Abyss.) And then the damn thing became the biggest movie ever and won 11 Oscars. With good cause, though: This thing plays, and also pre-visions Cameron’s later career by playing particularly well in a movie theater. Sure, it still “works” at home because it’s beautifully crafted, well-acted, and just plain engaging. But on a big movie screen, in public, with other people around to hear you sniffling, this is the disaster movie to end all disaster movies, including the many that followed in its wake. The sheer hugeness of that boat going vertical, snapping off, and then sinking, enveloped by the darkness of the sea is, despite being set in 1912, a stirring tribute to both the frightening majesty of technology and the potential wrath of nature. Also, that thing where the guy falls off the capsizing boat and eats it on the propeller on the way down is low-key super influential.
1. Aliens (1986)
Maybe it’s not fair to say Cameron’s best movie is one based on characters and concepts he didn’t originate himself. Then again, there’s a certain knowingness to Cameron’s wresting control of a beloved sci-fi-horror classic, as evidenced by the now-legendary (but apparently true!) story of his characteristically hubris-laden pitch: Writing “ALIEN” on a board and then appending it with “$” to drive home the irresistible simplicity of what he had in mind. Of course, Aliens is actually more logistically complicated than its predecessor. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) wakes up after a 57-year deep freeze, returned to Earth to find that the nefarious Weyland-Yutani corporation has gone ahead with setting up a colony on the exomoon where she first encountered the xenomorph of the previous picture. When the company predictably loses contact with the colony, she reluctantly agrees to accompany a group of Marines investigating the situation. What they find there is aliens. And a mech-suit. And some of grabbiest, most visceral sci-fi action of all time, with an emotional backbone so strong that when the next sequel dared fuck with it, its entire reputation was more or less instantly torpedoed. (Alien 3 innocent!). Weaver also snagged a much-deserved Best Actress Oscar nomination for the rare sequel that expands and deepens its iconic lead in a meaningful way—and makes a strong woman into a mother figure without cheapening her character in the process. As much as Aliens is an ante-upping, dollar-signed thrill ride that gave Cameron a bigger canvas after the scrappier Terminator, it’s also a surprising meditation on (and upending of) femininity, pitting grief-stricken mother (the detail of Ripley’s daughter dying while she was in stasis isn’t in the theatrical cut, but her grief at the loss of all that time still looms over everything) against the fiercest alien queen in the galaxy. Ripley and the xenomorphs may be someone else’s characters, but Aliens recontextualizes them in the ultimate James Cameron movie.