James Cameron is directing a new movie that has nothing to do with Avatar

James Cameron has announced plans for a new movie, and it’s his first non-Avatar feature since Titanic in 1997.

The Avatar movies have monopolised James Cameron’s time. The writer-director began developing the story in the mid-1990s, and started shooting the first movie in 2007, which ultimately hit screens in 2009.

Avatar: The Way of Water belatedly followed in 2022, while three further sequels are planned for 2025, 2029, and 2031.

Now however, we know what Cameron has planned for when he closes Pandora’s Box, and it’s a WWII story set in Japan, and focusing on the nuclear blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Deadline reports that the film will be titled Last Train From Hiroshima, and based on Charles Pellegrino’s book of the same name, as well as his forthcoming tome on the same subject, Ghosts of Hiroshima.

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Both books feature testimony by bomb survivors, and Cameron’s new film will revolve around a man who survived the Hiroshima bomb, only to then be hit by the blast in Nagasaki, which he also survived.

“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,” Cameron told Deadline. “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.”

Ghosts of Hiroshima will be released by Blackstone Publishing in August 2025, which marks the 80th anniversary of the dropping of the bomb.

James Cameron’s next feature is Avatar: Fire and Ash, which has set a release date of December 19, 2025. For films hitting screens sooner than that, here’s your guide to the best new movies out this month.