James Cameron is riding high. Avatar: Fire and Ash has been yet another critical, audience and box office smash, making him the only director in history with four consecutive movies to have grossed over a billion dollars. A nice little cherry on top this week was two well-deserved Oscar nominations.
But, perhaps understandably for someone whose last three movies have been ecological parables that end with cruel American soldiers being chomped, smashed, impaled, drowned, and generally righteously obliterated, it turns out he’s not a particularly big fan of the current direction of the United States.
“I’m there for the sanity”
Cameron, who is Canadian, now resides primarily in New Zealand and doesn’t plan to return to North American anytime soon. Speaking on In Depth with Graham Singer, Cameron didn’t mince words:
James Cameron: “This is why I love New Zealand. People there are, for the most part, sane as opposed to the United States where you had a 62% vaccination rate, and that’s going down, going the wrong direction. Where would you rather live? A place that actually believes in science… pic.twitter.com/UFm12QtRbs
— Marco Foster (@MarcoFoster_) January 23, 2026
“After the pandemic hit… [New Zealand] had eliminated the virus completely. They actually eliminated the virus twice. The third time when it showed up in a mutated form, it broke through. But fortunately, they already had a 98% vaccination rate.
This is why I love New Zealand. People there are, for the most part, sane as opposed to the United States where you had a 62% vaccination rate, and that’s going down, going the wrong direction.
Where would you rather live? A place that actually believes in science and is sane and where people can work together cohesively to a common goal, or a place where everybody’s at each other’s throats, extremely polarized, turning its back on science and basically would be in utter disarray if another pandemic appears? I’m not there for the scenery, I’m there for the sanity.”
It’s difficult to counter anything he says here. Under the second Trump administration scientific funding has been obliterated and public health is in shambles amidst the frankly bonkers pseudoscience put out by RFK Jr.
The United States was hardly prepared in 2020 when COVID hit, but you have to shudder if you imagine how things would go in 2026 if history repeated itself. At least under Trump 2.0 and RFK, there’d be no lockdown, no masking, no encouragement for social distancing, and little to no push for vaccinations. Any future virus would simply tear through the population unchecked until it burned out, leaving stacks of corpses in its wake.
In the meantime, we can only hope that Cameron gets on with the next two Avatar movies as quickly as possible, as we want to see Na’vi wreaking havoc when they visit Earth and putting us horrible humans in our place.
