10 Lies About Famous Movies You Probably Believe

6. Avatar

The Lie: "James Cameron was making Avatar for a decade. In an alternate reality of cinema we got Avatar ten years early. An idea he'd written a treatment for back in 1994, James Cameron's plan was to make the film immediately following his equally massive Titanic, but the limitations of the time meant he had to first work on getting the technology up to scratch. When the film finally arrived in late 2009, it was reported the director had been working on it for over ten years, making this a stupendous achievement."

The Truth: He kept pretty busy in those intervening years. You know this claim is greatly exaggerated when Cameron actually released a film in the interim, Ghosts Of The Abyss, a documentary about the wreck of the Titanic. In fact, it was only after Abyss in 2003 that he began pushing on Avatar, and even then he was looking at other projects (he was attached to the Battle Angel Alita adaptation before he permanently moved to Pandora).

The film wasn't green-lit (and thus provided with money to properly push forward on the tech) until late 2005. So in reality he was making the film for four years. That's pretty impressive as it is, but you don't make $2.7 billion dollars for being just pretty impressive and thus the exaggerated truth stuck.