James Cameron has strongly denied a report that he is “in talks” to direct a streaming series about the Titan submersible tragedy.
On Saturday, tabloid The Sun claimed that Cameron was discussing the series — which would form a bizarro thematic triptych with his Titanic and The Abyss — with a major streaming service, and that Matt Damon and Kumail Nanjiani were frontrunners for roles. “It is a subject close to [Cameron’s] heart,” an unnamed source told the Sun.
Even though the OceanGate movie rumors were far-fetched and implausible — the Avatar franchise is scheduled to take up the next decade of Cameron’s life, with sequels planned through 2031 (and that’s if future installments are not postponed further by the “double strike“) — Cameron still felt compelled to respond to the tabloid report.
“I don’t respond to offensive rumors in the media usually, but I need to now,” the director tweeted Saturday. “I’m NOT in talks about an OceanGate film, nor will I ever be.”
(However, conspiracy theorists will note that Cameron rejected the notion of making an “OceanGate film,” he didn’t actually deny the original report of an OceanGate series.)
Despite days spent counting down the missing submersible’s oxygen levels following its disappearance, the U.S. Navy revealed June 22 that the Titan imploded, killing the five people onboard, just 200 meters off the bow of the wreckage of the Titanic; debris discovered by a remote-operated vehicle on the seafloor was “consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel.”
In the aftermath of the accident, Cameron, a deep sea aficionado, appeared on ABC News to say that “many people in the community were very concerned about this sub” and that “a number of the top players in the deep submergence engineering community even wrote letters to the company, saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and that it needed to be certified and so on.”
Cameron added he was “struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night and many died as a result.” He added, “For us, a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded to take place at the same exact site with all the diving that’s going on all around the world, I think it’s just astonishing. It’s really quite surreal.”
Not surreal enough to make a series about, however.
From Rolling Stone US
