Jon Landau, Oscar-winning producer of Titanic and Avatar, dies at 63

LOS ANGELES – Jon Landau, an Oscar-winning producer and long-time collaborator of director James Cameron who helped bring to life three of the highest-grossing films, Titanic and the two Avatar movies, died in Los Angeles on July 5. He was 63.

His death was announced by his family in a statement released by Disney Entertainment. It did not give a cause of death.

Landau and Cameron’s decades-long collaboration made box-office history. The first film they made together, Titanic, became the first movie to gross more than US$1 billion globally after its 1997 release. Its total earnings record, US$1.84 billion, was broken by the next film they made together, the science-fiction epic Avatar (2009).

Titanic was nominated for 14 Oscars and won 11, including for Best Picture, an award Cameron and Landau shared.

“I can’t act and I can’t compose and I can’t do visual effects, so I guess that’s why I’m producing,” Landau said in his acceptance speech.

Landau was born on July 23, 1960, in New York City. His first exposure to film-making was through his parents, Ely and Edie Landau, who together produced ambitious independent films for a mass audience, including adaptations of stage plays by Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee and Bertolt Brecht.

Many of these adaptations were released through a subscription service that the Landaus created, called the American Film Theatre, which gave audiences access to regular screenings of movie versions of plays.

Jon Landau studied at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles and later worked as a production manager on films including Honey, I Shrunk The Kids (1989) and Dick Tracy (1990).

He became executive vice-president of feature productions at 20th Century Fox, where he oversaw films including Home Alone (1990), Mrs Doubtfire (1993) and Speed (1994).

It was during this time that he met Cameron, who was directing True Lies (1994), an action-comedy distributed by 20th Century Fox, the statement said. When Landau decided to leave the company, Cameron asked if he wanted to read the script for a project code-named Planet Ice. That project would become Titanic and kick off a partnership that lasted decades.

Titanic was not expected to be a box-office hit. The film lasts more than three hours, and before its release, there was extensive critical news coverage detailing delays with the production, which cost US$200 million, far exceeding the film’s US$110 million budget.

After the wild success of Titanic, Landau told the Los Angeles Times in 1998 that he had felt like “the mayor of the city” during the production.

“I had all these constituents, including heads of various departments, such as special effects, props, wardrobe, that needed help and support – sometimes moral support, sometimes financial support,” he said.

And when it came to the stress of going tens of millions of dollars over budget, Landau said it was “easy to fight for the things we were asking because we believed they were necessary for creating the initial vision of the movie”.

Cameron told the Los Angeles Times that “most producers produce a budget, not a movie”, but not Landau.

“The hardest thing to do is weigh additional expenses against the aesthetic gains to the film – you have to tap into a director’s brain a bit,” Cameron said. “Landau understood what a film-maker needs.”

The second film they made together, Avatar, grossed nearly US$3 billion worldwide and was nominated for nine Oscars. It won for Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography and Best Visual Effects. A sequel, Avatar: The Way Of Water, was released in 2022.

Landau also worked as chief operating officer of Cameron’s production studio, Lightstorm Entertainment, and was the driving force behind a Walt Disney World attraction based on the Avatar movies.

The family statement said Landau is survived by his wife Julie, their two sons Jamie and Jodie, his sisters Tina and Kathy, and his brother Les.

Just before the release of Avatar in December 2009, Landau told the digital magazine Salon how he justified making such expensive movies, saying that it gives investors a return on their capital, creates jobs and gives the audience “something they can’t get anywhere else”.

“When they go to see our movie, and we’ve maybe spent more money than the next guy, you know what? The audience is getting more bang for their buck,” he said. “They don’t pay any more money to see our movie than they pay to see Paranormal Activity,” he added, referring to the 2007 horror movie that cost only US$15,000 to make.

Landau also said he made movies for the audience, not critics or award show voters.

“We want to entertain people, and that’s first and foremost,” he said. “If anything else comes along, that’s great. But we want people to enjoy the movies, not just viscerally, but also emotionally.” NYTIMES