James Cameron’s $100M Blockbuster Faced Plagiarism Claims Before AI

Back in 1994, James Cameron released his first film with a budget topping $100 million, well before artificial intelligence started churning out scripts and sparking debates about originality. The action-comedy True Lies, featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis, drew its inspiration from the 1991 French comedy La Totale! Cameron’s adaptation saw Schwarzenegger as Harry Tasker, a government agent juggling his secret life with family commitments.

Despite being Cameron’s only foray into adapting someone else’s work, the project soon found itself in legal hot water. In 2000, Cameron and Claude Zidi, who directed the original French film, were taken to court by Lucien Lambert, a French screenwriter. Lambert claimed Zidi had lifted material from his unproduced 1981 script, Émilie, when making La Totale!

Legal Wrangles and Courtroom Drama

The dispute eventually landed in the Court of Appeal of Paris. In June 2004, the court sided with Lambert, ordering Zidi to hand over a portion of the roughly $15 million he’d earned from the film’s success. Cameron, however, was cleared of any wrongdoing, as the court found he’d bought the rights to La Totale! in good faith, with no knowledge of the earlier script’s existence.

True Lies, produced by Lightstorm Entertainment, hit cinemas on 15 July 1994 and raked in $378 million worldwide. The film scored a 7.3/10 on IMDb and a 72% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Alongside Schwarzenegger and Curtis, Tom Arnold rounded out the main cast. Despite its popularity, talk of a sequel has never materialised into anything concrete.

Why True Lies 2 Never Happened

Plans for a follow-up were in the works, but the world changed after the events of 9/11. The cast and crew, who had been keen on a sequel, felt the subject of terrorism could no longer be treated with the same irreverence as before. Cameron himself admitted he couldn’t bring himself to make another film in the same vein, saying it just didn’t feel right “given the current world climate.”

Jamie Lee Curtis echoed this sentiment in a 2019 interview, stating,

I don’t think we could ever do another ‘True Lies’ after 9/11. This was pre 9/11 so I wouldn’t want to say we could make fun of terrorism but we could make fun of terrorism because it was so outrageous and of course, we can’t ever make fun of them ever again.

Scripts, Rewrites, and Fading Hopes

Arnold Schwarzenegger mentioned in a 2003 chat that a draft for the sequel included a dramatic fight scene aboard a crashing plane, but the script was being reworked as “these things take a long time.” Over the years, updates on the project became less frequent, and eventually, it became clear that a second instalment wasn’t on the cards.

Despite the legal drama and the sequel that never was, Cameron’s 1994 action-comedy remains a classic, still enjoyed by punters today.