Catfight (Now In 3D)

James Cameron recently told Vanity Fair that Piranha 3D “cheapens the medium of 3D", and proceeded to slag the genre, saying it harks back to bad 3-D horror films from the 70s and 80s. Mr. Box Office Champ added, "When movies got to the bottom of the barrel of their creativity and at the last gasp of their financial lifespan, they did a 3D version to get the last few drops of blood out of the turnip.” Humorously, he did not say anything about the re-release of Avatar with EIGHT NEW MINUTES of footage. (*yawn*)

That said, Piranha 3D’s producers were not just going to be Cameron's bitch. Producer Mark Canton fired back at length:

“Jim, are you kidding or what? First of all, let’s start by you accepting the fact that you were the original director of Piranha 2 and you were fired. Shame on you for thinking that genre movies and the real maestros like Roger Corman and his collaborators are any less auteur or impactful in the history of cinema than you. Martin Scorcese made Boxcar Bertha at the beginning of his career. And Francis Ford Coppola made Dimentia 13 back in 1963. And those are just a few examples of the talented and successful filmmakers whose roots are in genre films. Who are you to impugn any genre film or its creators?

“Having been deeply involved, as either an executive or as a producer, on Tim Burton’s original Batman and the first Men In Black, as well as 300, and now Immortals, one of the things that has been consistent about all of the filmmakers involved in these landscape-changing global films is that, in each and every case, all of the directors were humbled by their predecessors, their colleagues and by their awareness of the great history of film that came before them. The enjoyment and the immersion of an audience in a movie theatre, as they had and will have with the above-mentioned films, and as audiences are experiencing with Piranha 3D now, comes from the originality and the vision of the filmmaker, and not just from the creation of the technology.

Let’s just keep this in mind Jim….you did not invent 3D. You were fortunate that others inspired you to take it further. The simple truth is that I had nothing but good things to say about Avatar and my own experience since I actually saw it and didn’t damn someone else’s talent publicly in order to disassociate myself from my origins in the business from which we are all very fortunate . To be honest, I found the 3D in Avatar to be inconsistent and while ground breaking in many respects, sometimes I thought it overwhelmed the storytelling. Technology aside, I wish Avatar had been more original in its storytelling.

Point of fact: Box Office Mojo has Cameron's domestic film gross is $1,910,528,468, while Canton's has been $470,300,047 - barely a quarter of the take even with three more films in there. I'm not quoting Worthington's law, but...