The Daily Beast’s Kim Masters has an interesting temperature-taking piece today on how the failure of Bob Zemeckis’ A Christmas Carol has studio execs wringing their hands about 3-D, and Avatar’s potential to revolutionize the industry. Maybe adding a third dimension won’t save everyone’s butts after all? Along with this Defamer post about how Avatar will supposedly make audiences vomit, dubious buzz for the film seems to be cresting. But this is a place Cameron has been before, on Titanic, as I write in the “Unsinkable” chapter of The Futurist. Yes, before he released the highest-grossing movie of all time and winner of a record-tying 11 Oscars, there were also puking claims…:

Media buzz on the movie began to swirl around Cameron’s apparent ravenousness with money. Variety launched a regular “Titanic Watch” column to detail the set’s excesses, and Time ran a piece head-lined “Glub, Glub, Glub . . . Can James Cameron’s Extravagant Titanic Avoid Disaster?” It didn’t help that Waterworld, Kevin Costner’s $170 million high-seas adventure released in July 1995, was widely regarded as a costly misfire. Early efforts to market Titanic were challenging, too, including finding enough material to present at ShoWest, the Las Vegas convention of theater exhibitors, in March 1997. Almost none of the special-effects shots were done. It was decided to use a long, linear trailer instead of a bunch of quick-cut scenes. On a Sunday night, before she was to view the material, Sanchini got a call from a studio executive at Paramount. “I just saw the trailer, and I’m throwing up on my shoes,” he told her. Paramount was expecting something Cameron-esque—chases, explosions—not a little old lady narrating a story about a necklace. Meanwhile, the production was dragging way behind schedule. Meant to take 135 days to shoot, Titanic would actually require 165 days of production. Titanic the movie appeared to be mirroring Titanic the ship—a creation that was far too large, a product of man’s hubris barreling toward an iceberg.

Cameron tuned out the media hum, but the budget pressures weighed on him. “I felt very strongly that I had let these guys down,” Cameron says of Fox. “I had told them I would do it for a certain amount of money, and I’d failed to deliver on that.” In a series of exchanges during the making of the movie, Cameron kept offering to give Fox back money, first his front-end fee, then his entire share of the back end. Twentieth Century Fox president Bill Mechanic, the unfortunate Fox executive charged with reining the production in, told Cameron the back-end offer was a noble but ultimately hollow gesture, because the film would never see a dime of profit. He countered by suggesting that Cameron should not only surrender all his points on Titanic but give back half his points on the next film he did for Fox. This conversation happened in Cameron’s living room. Mechanic’s counteroffer didn’t go over well. “Get the fuck out of my house,” Cameron replied. The director rescinded his offer of the back-end points. “Nobody ever gives back money in Hollywood,” says Chernin, Mechanic’s boss at the time. “On the one hand, Jim was killing us. On the other hand, here was a man of great conscience.” In the end, the filmmaker and his studio agreed on one thing. “We kept saying, ‘Our only hope is to make a great movie,’” Chernin says.