Today's 2nd Most Successful Director, James Cameron Started His Career With a Box Office Bomb

These days, James Cameron is almost a box office behemoth, only trailing behind Steven Spielberg in the list of the world's most highest-grossing film directors. But things were not always this way.

Cameron's directorial debut, titled Piranha II: The Spawning, was released in 1982, and it was so bad we wouldn't be too surprised if the then-amateur director quit the industry after this flop.

The fact that Cameron even tried to disown the film speaks volumes; later, however, he admitted that it was his directorial debut. The Piranha sequel was panned by critics and viewers alike, but these days, Cameron's devoted fans have given it a cult status.

The flop movie revolves around a scuba instructor and her scientist boyfriend who investigate a series of mysterious murders linked to mutant piranhas who live in a sunken ship off of a Caribbean resort.

But the failure of the movie was not, in fact, Cameron's fault.

“The film’s troubled production, which saw Cameron fired and forced to break into a studio to edit the movie that still bore his name, led him to later disavow the flying fish movie as his first directorial credit,” reads the book A Critical Companion to James Cameron.

The director went as far as trying to remove his name from the credits, but he was legally unable to do so. Finally, he made peace with the fact that his first step in the industry was the fish flop, and not the massively successful Terminator.

But honestly, who cares now? Today, Cameron enjoys an $8 billion worldwide box office, and two of the highest-grossing movies of all time, Avatar and Titanic, are directed by him.

So it's a huge W for the iconic director that he didn't let the piranhas fiasco sink his career!