The Abyss 4K Release Gets Promising Update From James Cameron

James Cameron says that a 4K release of The Abyss is coming soon. The movie, which established Cameron’s reputation as a filmmaker obsessed with authenticity, is not one of his higher-grossing films, but remains popular with his fans, who have long requested a high definition version of the movie. Titanic is set for a 4K reissue in December, and Cameron has been overseeing transfers for some of his films, including the original Avatar, in between working on the third Avatar film, which is obviously a pretty time-consuming task in itself.

Speaking at Beyond Fest (via JoBlo), where he hosted a special screening of The Abyss, Cameron confirmed they had added The Abyss onto the slate of projects he’s releasing in high def. The filmmaker said that most of the work is already done, and it will be available in the coming months.

“All of the mastering is done and I think it drops pretty soon — a couple of months or something like that,” Cameron said. “There’s a lot of added material that they’re sticking in there, and it will be available on streaming simultaneously. But I didn’t just want to look at the old HD transfer. I wanted to do it right.” 

The Beyond Fest screening was not the 4K print [note: this story originally suggested it was, based on the reporting out of the festival, but representatives reached out to clarify the screened print was the 2K version]. 

“We finished the transfer and I wanted to do it myself because Mikael [Salomon] did such a beautiful job with the cinematography on that film. It is truly, truly gorgeous cinematography,” Cameron shared with Space.com last year. “That was before I started to assert myself in terms of lighting and asking the cinematographer to do certain things. I’d compose with the camera and choose the lenses, but I left the lighting to him. He did a remarkable job on that movie that I appreciate better now than I did even as we were making it.”

He continued, “I’d also like to point out that he took one look at the first day’s dailies of the underwater lighting and he went out and learned to scuba dive. He came in the following Monday morning, the worst diver in the world, but he reinvented underwater lighting. He went for indirect lighting and he got everybody doing things that were not just outside their comfort zone, they’d never even thought of it. Suddenly the underwater shots start to live up to the surface photography.”