Cameron brought up the idea of hiring Landau to Rae Sanchini, president of Cameron’s production company Lightstorm; she agreed, and Landau not only came on board but became his “chief co-strategist.” Landau was just 35 at the time.
Cameron told Parisi that he and Landau gamed out “the broad strokes” of “Titanic” together, in every area except for visual effects, which were overseen by Cameron’s FX company Digital Domain. “Jon and I figured out how to do everything on the movie. The broad strokes. How are we going to do this? What are we going to build? Are we going to build this side or that side? Are we going to build this length? Are we going to build the forward well deck? Is it going to be attached or is it going to be a separate set? If Jon didn’t think of it, I thought of it, and we bounded stuff off each other until we eventually homed in on the answer.”
Landau’s experience as a studio executive in the early years of what was called “vertical integration” also helped him plan out wider marketplace strategies for Cameron’s work, beyond the film itself, its life in theaters, and its afterlife on home video. According to Variety, Landau “was the architect of Lightstorm’s ancillary projects, such as Dark Horse Comics and Penguin Random House’s various ‘Avatar’ print spinoffs. Landau also advised the creation of ‘Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora,’ the well-received Ubisoft game that released in December, as well as an online multiplayer role-playing game from Tencent Games’ Level Infinite called ‘Avatar: Reckoning.'”
“I view every movie as a startup company,” Landau told The Talks in December 2022, before the release of the second “Avatar,” which was (true to form) expected to disappoint but ended up grossing over $2 billion and getting multiple Oscar nominations. “I am the only one who is involved from the inception to the conception of it. And I have to do that across a plethora of different avenues: What are we doing in publishing? What do we do with Cirque du Soleil on their show? I’m involved in all of those things from a stewardship standpoint of the film, and when we make a movie, my responsibility, I think, first and foremost, is that we realize the vision we set out to make at the beginning. And my responsibility is not just to deal with Jim and help him do that, it’s to communicate to our crew, what that vision is, to empower them to take responsibility. And we do that out of a sense of creativity.”
“I worked with Jon Landau for 31 years and I never saw him downcast once,” Cameron said in a statement released after Landau’s death. “He led with a balance of humor and fierce will, and true joy in the work.”
Jon Landau is survived by his wife of 40 years, Julie, their sons Jamie and Jodie, and two sisters and a brother.