Cameron Criticizes ‘Battleship’ Story, Obviously Hasn’t Seen ‘Avatar’

James Cameron, the only guy with any original ideas in Hollywood, has thrown the proposed Battleship movie under the bus in a recent German interview, coming to us from Moviefone. In a brief rant, he chides Universal and their $200 million Battleship plans for essentially being derivative and awful. Of course, it’s possible that Universal wasn’t willing to exercise Cameron-like patience and wait around for 12 years between projects, because that’s not always a viable business model.

He stopped short of predicting it would be a nightmarish mash-up of special effects and thin plots, ’cause, you know, glass houses and whatnot, but he does go on about how Hollywood puts too much of a premium on established brands and not enough on creating new ones. He seems to (consciously or not) overlook the fact that respected helmer Peter Berg is running the Battleship circus, which throws a little more credibility behind the production of a big-budget feature based on a simplistic board game. (The fact that Rihanna and Brooklyn Decker are also on board is another story altogether.) His words may have had more gravity if he had cited a Michael Bay movie, but Transformers movies only come out every nine months or so, and Cameron didn’t want to wait that long to let his feelings be known.

Cameron summed up his point nicely, saying, “They want to make the Battleship game into a film… This is pure desperation.” Says the gentleman whose next two projects are Avatar 2 and Avatar 3.