James Cameron Lines Up Post-Avatar Directing Gig With The Informationist

Oscar-winning filmmaker-turned-explorer expands his cinematic slate after optioning a best-seller featuring a strong Sarah Connor type

By Josh Grossberg Oct 24, 2012 3:15 PMTags
James CameronBBC

His long-promised Avatar sequels are still a few years away, but James Cameron already knows what he wants to do once he leaves Pandora.

The King of the World's production company, Lightstorm Entertainment, has bought the movie rights to Taylor Stevens' best-seller The Informationist, which he hopes to shoot once his Avatar trilogy is complete in 2016.

Like much of Cameron's oeuvre, the story features a take-no-prisoners action heroine in the form of Vanessa Munroe, a gumshoe who grew up among gunrunners and mercenaries in Africa and hires herself out as an information specialist to Fortune 500 companies, heads of state and private citizens. The character has frequently been compared to Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander in his Millennium trilogy.

In The Informationist, which was published in October 2011 and is the first novel in a planned seven-part series, Munroe is tapped to search for the daughter of a Houston oilman who went missing in Central Africa four years earlier. The mission takes her back to the continent where she cut her teeth and tried unsuccessfully to escape her past.

The thriller and its protagonist are right in Cameron's wheelhouse.

"Taylor Stevens' Vanessa Michael Munroe is an intriguing and compelling heroine with an agile mind and a thirst for adventure," the Titanic helmer said in a statement. "Equally fascinating for me is her emotional life and her unexpected love story."

The 58-year-old Cameron will coproduce the flick with longtime producing partner Jon Landau, and the duo plan to hire a screenwriter to get down to work while the filmmaker is making his next two Avatar features.

The Na'vi mastermind is currently writing the scripts to the sci-fi twofer, both parts of which he plans to start shooting simultaneously by late 2013 or early 2014. Avatar 2 is due to hit theaters in 2015 with Avatar 3 following a year later, after which Cameron will get to work on The Informationist.