Deadline is exclusively confirming that James Cameron has officially purchased the rights to Charles Pellegrino’s forthcoming book “Ghosts of Hiroshima.” The film follows the man who survived the atomic blast at Hiroshima, got on a train to Nagasaki and then survived a nuclear explosion in that city.
Cameron will be using ‘Ghosts’, and Pellegrino’s 2015 book ‘Last Train From Hiroshima’, as the source material for this next film. He’s set to shoot it “as soon as “Avatar” production permits.” Cameron is telling Deadline that the two books will be adapted into one “uncompromising theatrical film.” The film will be titled “The Last Train to Hiroshima.”
Pellegrino’s books tackle the event and aftermath of two days in August 1945, when the nuclear bomb was dropped on Japan and changed the world forever. Pellegrino relies on eyewitness accounts of those who experienced the explosions firsthand — “the Japanese civilians on the ground and the American flyers in the air.”
“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 tells 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.”
‘Hiroshima’ is set to be Cameron’s first non-Avatar film since 1997’s “Titanic”.
Cameron started working on the first “Avatar” movie in 1999. From a filmmaking standpoint, it’s all he’s been concentrating on since then. That means that by 2027, Cameron would have almost exclusively worked on ‘Avatar’ for nearly 30 years.
I’m not saying it was a waste of time, Cameron seems genuinely passionate about these movies and, they’ve been incredibly successful endeavors. However, from my point of view, as someone who was thrilled to no ends by Cameron’s visual miracles in “The Terminator,” “T2,” “Aliens,” and “Titanic,” I can’t help but hope that ‘Hiroshima’ comes soon.
Netflix and Skydance Animation have also called it quits. The two sides announced Monday that they're ending the animated film deal struck back in 2023, framing it as a mutual decision.