James Cameron to direct movie adaptation of Last Train from Hiroshima

James Cameron is set to direct a movie adaptation of Last Train from Hiroshima after finishing work on the fifth Avatar film.

The 70-year-old director is currently working on the next three instalments of the sci-fi franchise, though it has now been revealed Cameron will be helming a film adaptation of Charles Pellegrino’s 2015 novel of the same name — as well as the author’s upcoming book Ghosts of Hiroshima — which features eyewitness accounts from Japanese civilians and American pilots who saw atomic bombs devastate Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.

The picture is said to follow a Japanese man who survived the detonation at Hiroshima in 1945, only to board a train to Nagasaki and experience the same horror again.

The Terminator director told Deadline: “It’s a subject that I’ve wanted to do a film about, that I’ve been wrestling with how to do it, over the years. I met Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a survivor of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just days before he died.

“He was in the hospital. He was handing the baton of his personal story to us, so I have to do it. I can’t turn away from it.”

While visiting Yamaguchi, Cameron and Pellegrino vowed to ‘pass on his unique and harrowing experience to future generations’ through the picture.

Cameron is currently focused on his next blockbuster Avatar: Fire and Ash and its two sequels — which are slated for release in 2029 and 2031 respectively — and had insisted he wouldn’t drop out of the series unless he gets ‘hit by a bus’.

When The Hollywood Reporter asked him if he was still planning to helm the franchise past the third instalment — which will hit cinemas on Dec 19, 2025 — he said: “Sure. Absolutely. I mean, they’re going to have to stop me.

“I’ve got plenty of energy, love doing what I’m doing. Why would I not? And they’re written, by the way.

“I just reread both of them about a month ago. They’re cracking stories. They’ve got to get made. Look, if I get hit by a bus and I’m in an iron lung, somebody else is going to do it.”