The Forgotten Plagiarism Controversy Behind James Cameron’s First $100M Epic — Long Before AI

James Cameron made a big, loud, ridiculously fun spy movie in 1994, and it also happens to be his first $100 million-plus production and the only time he has ever adapted someone else’s story. That movie is True Lies. The backstory is oddly complicated, the sequel that everyone talked about never happened for a very understandable reason, and yes, there was a plagiarism case... just not the way internet myths tell it.

The movie

True Lies is Cameron’s spin on the 1991 French comedy La Totale!, with Arnold Schwarzenegger playing Harry Tasker, a U.S. government operative trying not to let his double life blow up his marriage. Jamie Lee Curtis and Tom Arnold co-star. It’s a glossy, action-comedy from the pre-9/11 era when terrorism was still being used as broad movie villainy rather than something handled with kid gloves.

• Directed by: James Cameron
• Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Arnold
• Release date: July 15, 1994
• Budget: $115 million
• Worldwide box office: $378 million
• IMDb rating: 7.3/10
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 72%
• Production company: Lightstorm Entertainment
• Where to watch: YouTube TV

So did Cameron plagiarize True Lies?

Short answer: no. Longer answer: there was a very French legal tangle after the fact.

Here’s what actually happened. Cameron legally bought the rights to remake La Totale! and built True Lies from that. Years later, in 2000, French screenwriter Lucien Lambert sued director Claude Zidi, the filmmaker behind La Totale!, claiming Zidi lifted elements from Lambert’s unproduced 1981 script titled Emilie. The case went all the way to the Court of Appeal of Paris. In June 2004, the court sided with Lambert and ordered Zidi to pay him an undisclosed sum drawn from the roughly $15 million Zidi had earned off the film’s success. Cameron, meanwhile, was cleared because he had purchased the remake rights in good faith. Translation: the mess was upstream, and Cameron wasn’t on the hook.

The sequel everyone wanted but no one made

For years, the cast and Cameron kicked around True Lies 2. Then 9/11 happened, and the tone of the first film suddenly felt like a relic. Cameron said he couldn’t move forward on a sequel "given the current world climate." Jamie Lee Curtis put it even more bluntly in 2019:

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.

Arnold Schwarzenegger even talked in 2003 about a draft that included a wild midair fight on a plummeting plane. They were already rewriting, and as he shrugged at the time, "These things take a long time." Then the updates slowed to a crawl, and eventually stopped. The door quietly shut.

Where that leaves True Lies

It stands as a big, sleek, very 1994 Cameron juggernaut that still moves. No sequel, no reboot with the original team. Just the one movie, which is probably the right call given the tonal shift the world took after 9/11. If you haven’t revisited it in a while, it’s exactly the kind of swing studios used to take without blinking.