“I can’t act and I can’t compose and I can’t do visual effects. I guess that’s why I’m producing,” Landau said while accepting the award with Cameron.
Their partnership continued, with Landau becoming a top executive at Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment. In 2009 the pair watched as Avatar, a sci-fi epic filmed and shown in theatres with groundbreaking 3D technology, surpassed the box office success of Titanic. It remains the top-grossing film of all time.
Its sequel, Avatar: The Way Of Water, is third on the list.
Landau has been a key player in the Avatar franchise, which saw frequent delays of the release of The Way Of Water. Landau defended the sequel’s progress and Cameron’s ambitious plans to film multiple sequels at once to keep the franchise going.
“A lot has changed but a lot hasn’t,” Landau told The Associated Press in 2022, a few months ahead of the sequel’s release. “One of the things that has not changed is: Why do people turn to entertainment today? Just like they did when the first Avatar was released, they do it to escape, to escape the world in which we live.”
Landau was named an executive vice president of feature movies at 20th Century Fox when he was 29, which led him to oversee major hits including Home Alone and its sequel, as well as Mrs Doubtfire and True Lies, where he first started working closely with Cameron.
Born in New York on Jul 23, 1960, Landau was the son of film producers Ely and Edie Landau.
Ely Landau died in 1993. Edie Landau, the Oscar-nominated producer of films like Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Hopscotch and The Deadly Game, died in 2022.
Jon Landau is survived by his wife of nearly 40 years, Julie, and their sons, Jamie and Jodie.