James Cameron Commits To Last Train From Hiroshima Movie Adaptation As Next Project

For the past nigh-on two decades, news of a new James Cameron movie has generally meant news of a new Avatar movie. But whilst cinema's self-proclaimed 'King Of The World' is still committed to taking audiences to the alien world of Pandora for the foreseeable future (Avatar: Fire And Ash should be here next Christmas, with at least two more sequels on the horizon), he has just added something new — and something very different — to his pipeline. Per Deadline's reporting, the Aliens and Terminator mastermind has snapped up the rights to Charles Pellegrino's upcoming historical book Ghosts Of Hiroshima, and will use that — as well as Pellegrino's previous non-fiction book The Last Train From Hiroshima — as the basis for a single feature about the atomic bomb drops on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Described by Cameron himself as an "uncompromising theatrical film", The Last Train From Hiroshima — which will reportedly shoot as soon as Avatar production permits — will pivot around the remarkable true story of a Japanese man who, having survived the atomic bomb drop on Hiroshima, hitched a ride to Nagasaki and survived a second nuclear blast there. And whilst we don't know specifics of the plot for Cameron's movie just yet, we do know that both of Pellegrino's books will provide a strong factual and emotional foundation for his work, incorporating as they do both the eye-witness testimony of survivors as well as recent developments in forensic archaeology. Plus, this won't be Pellegrino and Cameron's first creative collaboration, as the author has previously worked as a science consultant on both Titanic and Avatar.

“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 revealed to 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.” Per Cameron's own words, The Last Train From Hiroshima will serve as the fulfilment of a promise to “pass on his unique and harrowing experience to future generations.”

With the recent success and critical acclaim of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, and the announcement back in April that Denis Villeneuve is set to tackle nuclear anxieties with a forthcoming adaptation of speculative non-fiction book Nuclear War: A Scenario, it will be interesting to see how Cameron — whose own filmography is littered with imagery that evokes the palpable threat of nuclear war — brings his unique brand of big spectacle, bigger hearted moviemaking to such a timely (and timeless) subject. But while we wait for more news on this one, The Last Train From Hiroshima is already available to buy and read, and Ghosts Of Hiroshima is set to release in August 2025.