Not to (or maybe to) beat a dead horse, this rather long article, is EXACTLY what I, and many others, have been saying about Avatarland.
Five Years Ago, 'Avatar' Grossed $2.7 Billion But Left No Pop Culture Footprint
Scott Mendelson
James Cameron’s Avatar defied the skeptics and became the highest-grossing film of all time, but five years later it is all but forgotten in the pop culture landscape.
Today is the fifth anniversary of the theatrical release of James Cameron’s 3D action spectacular. Avatar earned rave reviews, went on to become by far the highest-grossing movie of all time, and won several Oscars. It then almost immediately vanished from the popular zeitgeist, leaving almost no pop culture impact to speak of. It did not inspire a passionate following, or a deluge of multimedia spin-offs that has kept the brand alive over the last five years. Few today will even admit to liking it, and its overall effect on the culture at large is basically non-existent. It came, it crushed all long-term box office records, and it vanished almost without a trace.
Five Years Ago, 'Avatar' Grossed $2.7 Billion But Left No Pop Culture Footprint
Scott Mendelson
James Cameron’s Avatar defied the skeptics and became the highest-grossing film of all time, but five years later it is all but forgotten in the pop culture landscape.
Today is the fifth anniversary of the theatrical release of James Cameron’s 3D action spectacular. Avatar earned rave reviews, went on to become by far the highest-grossing movie of all time, and won several Oscars. It then almost immediately vanished from the popular zeitgeist, leaving almost no pop culture impact to speak of. It did not inspire a passionate following, or a deluge of multimedia spin-offs that has kept the brand alive over the last five years. Few today will even admit to liking it, and its overall effect on the culture at large is basically non-existent. It came, it crushed all long-term box office records, and it vanished almost without a trace.
James Cameron’s Avatar was the exact opposite of a sure thing. Even with the famously grandiose auteur returning to cinemas 12 years after sailing Titanic to the top of the box office record books and winning 11 Oscars, the film itself was something of a question mark. Cameron had been teasing the film for a decade, promising something that would (my words) change cinema forever and/or make your face melt off and burn a hole through the floor below you. For a decade, Avatar was just a notion, it was just something that Cameron was working on in between trips to the bottom of the sea to explore the actual wreckage of the Titanic. Almost nothing was known about the picture until mid-August 2009 when the first teaser dropped, at which point we discovered that the film was basically a variation on the likes of (deep breath) Fern Gully: The Last Rain Forest, Pocahontas, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Dances With Wolves, The Last Samurai, and/or Battle for Terra.
The initial previews were visually spectacular, especially if you saw them on the so-called Avatar Day, when Fox rented out IMAX theaters around the country for a 17-minute sneak preview (I did, and it was the most efficiently run studio event I have ever been to). Sure the footage looked neat and the 3D looked pretty remarkable for a live-action film, but the giant blue creatures were easy fodder for mockery and the film’s somewhat well-worn plot left us underwhelmed in terms of the whole “revolutionizing cinema” thing. But we had forgotten the first rule of film punditry: Never bet against James Cameron.
Titanic underwent equally dismissive pre-release hand-wringing, but once critics actually saw the film, well, we all know what happened seventeen Decembers ago. Terminator 2: Judgment Day was the first film to cost $100 million and ended up being the third-biggest global grosser ($519m in 1991) of all-time behind E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial and Star Wars at the time. And it was the case for Avatar as well. It didn’t have the luxury of being based on a preexisting property (Sherlock Holmes felt like the easy lock for Christmas box office supremacy), and it was burdened with reports that wildly exaggerated its production and marketing costs so as to be able to crow that 20th Century Fox had spent $500 million on the picture. But Cameron had been down this road before.
But if we can carp about the mezzo-mezzo marketing materials, the seeming rush to proclaim Cameron as an emperor lacking clothes, or even Fox’s apparent lack of confidence by scheduling Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel a week later as a safety net, we must admit that Fox had a secret weapon: the movie itself. The film screened for critics on December 10th, and I attended the second (IMAX) screening on December 14th, just days before the film’s December 18th theatrical release. At that point, the word was out that the film was, to use my sophisticated critical jargon, f****** spectacular.
Yes the plot was a little well-worn and no the script wasn’t full of quotable Sorkin/Tarantino-esque dialogue, but the 3D was truly eye-popping, Zoe Saldana gave what is still one of the great motion-capture performances alongside Sam Worthington, and the movie just-plain worked like gangbusters. It didn’t quite revolutionize cinema as we know it, but the hype was more or less real. But would rave reviews be enough to turn the tide? Heck, King Kong, which opened on the same weekend in 2005, actually suffered due to overly rave reviews since it had pundits thinking it would actually challenge Titanic for similar box office and Oscar glory. Fox and company held their breath over opening weekend. Avatar rode the wave of buzz and weathered a brutal snow storm to open with $77 million, which was and still is the largest opening weekend of all-time for a “not based on anything” motion picture.
http://www.forbes.com/pictures/fimi45ehhff/hollywoods-most-overpai/
But opening weekends are about marketing and pre-release interest, the rest of the theatrical run is generally about the movie. Audiences having been knocked out by what they saw, in terms of the 3D, in terms of the visually glorious Pandora , and yes in terms of the primal “indigenous people beat back murderous invaders with the help of a turncoat member of the enemy” story that explicitly referenced a decade of post-9/11 imperialistic warfare. I talk a lot about not giving away the game in the marketing campaign can boost positive word-of-mouth since it will make the film’s real joys appear to be more of a discovery for moviegoers, and Avatar fit the bill. Like Jurassic Park in 1993, no one quite got how visually stunning Avatar was going to look, and quite a few of them came back for seconds. Well, this is where those who grew up in the late 90’s following this stuff got a jolt of déjà vu.
I distinctly remember the excitement in the air as the opening weekend of Titanic gave way to obscenely positive word of mouth leading into the Christmas season, and I honestly felt the same kind of heat this time around. I remember, as Avatar went from a $24 million Sunday to $16m single-day grosses for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, thinking out loud “This can’t be happening again, can it? He can’t have done this twice in a row, right?” But history indeed repeated itself as James Cameron’s sci-fi 3D opus dropped about 1.5% on its second weekend to earn $75.6m over the Christmas weekend. Not to be outdone, Sherlock Holmes earned $62m that weekend while Fox’s “safety net” Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel debuted with $47m over what is still the single-biggest box office weekend on record. Avatar’s second weekend gross of $75.1 million was eventually supplanted by The Avengers ($106m off a $207m weekend debut), but Avatar still holds the record for the biggest gross for weekends 3 ($69m), 4 ($50m), 5 ($42m), 6 ($34m), and 7 ($31m). Guess what movie still holds the record for weekends 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12.
Avatar crossed $1 billion by the end of its third weekend and topped Titanic‘s $1.8b worldwide cume, or what I used to call the ’Joe DiMaggio 56-game hitting streak’ of box office records, in just 38 days. It went on to earn $760m domestic (compared to Titanic’s $600m haul in 1997/1998, not counting the 2012 3D reissue) and a stunning $2.7b worldwide, topping the (at the time) $1.8b worldwide cume of Titanic by 50%. Even five years later, there are only 22 films that have grossed even half of Avatar’s final $760m domestic cume. Even five years later, only Titanic and The Avengers have earned half of Avatar’s $2.7b gross while just 30 films have earned a third of that worldwide. Avatar is the highest grossing film of all time by such a margin that we may not see anything approach its global cume for a very long time, if ever. Yet for all intents and purposes, the film is all-but-forgotten.
It did not become a cultural touchstone in any real sense. Kids don’t play Avatar on the playground nor with action figures in their homes. There is little-if-any Avatar-themed merchandise in any given store. Most general moviegoers couldn’t tell you the name of a single character from the film, nor could they name any of the actors who appeared in it. Even its strong showing at the Oscars hurt the film, as the narrative turned into “mean and scary James Cameron” against “weak and helpless Kathryn Bigelow” as if the former Ms. James Cameron needed any sympathy votes as she went on to become the first female Best Director winner for The Hurt Locker. Avatar didn’t inspire a legion of would-be Avatar rip-offs, save perhaps for Walt Disney DIS -0.70%’s disastrous John Carter. It didn’t set the mold for anything that followed save its use of 3D which turned the post-conversion tool into a valuable way to boost box office overseas.
If Avatar has any legacy at all, it is by normalizing and/or incentivizing studios to release their biggest would-be tent poles with some kind of 3D modification in order to charge more money for tickets. That’s obviously not necessarily a positive thing, as it led to a few years when seemingly every big film was artistically compromised by a half-hearted or rushed 3D conversion for the sake of a ticket up-charge. That’s less of an issue in America, although it remains a driving factor of international box office today. James Cameron wanted to show the world how great 3D could be, and Hollywood responded by showing us how terrible it could be too. Despite a pretty swift case of blockbuster backlash, whereby pundits quickly attributed the film’s box office success entirely to the 3D effects, I still think it’s a pretty fantastic adventure film. The characters are simple but primal, and the storytelling is lean and efficient even while running nearly three hours. Avatar was arguably the right film at the right time, with a potent anti-imperialism message that came about just as America was waking up from its post-9/11 stupor and the rest of the world was more-than-ready to cheer a film where murderous private armies were violently defeated and driven away by impassioned indigenous people.
But it was basically a historical cinematic footnote not a year later, with no real pop culture footprint beyond its record-setting box office and groundbreaking 3D. What’s sadder than what Avatar was remembered for (very little) is what it wasn’t remembered for. The positive lessons of Avatar’s success, an original story that resonated on a narrative and socially-topical level with truly eye-popping visuals being delivered by an auteur at the top of his game that touched the entire world for a brief period, were forgotten in favor of “everything must be 3D.” Avatar was not the first mega-blockbuster where Hollywood learned all of the wrong lessons (examples: nearly every other blockbuster ever made). But considering how big a deal it was for a brief period in time, it is all the more odd that exists solely as “that 3D movie that made a bunch of money.”
Aside from arguably cementing IMAX as the go-to destination for the biggest of big blockbuster movies (just over a year after they expanded via the digital IMAX screens) and kickstarting a mad dash for live-action 3D, Avatar didn’t really change the industry in any real way, for better or worse, and its seemingly franchise-ready world didn’t really go beyond the single initial film. For the moment, Avatar is a footnote in cinematic history. I’ve seen the film once in IMAX 3D, once on 2D blu-ray, and I caught the third act on an airplane last year, and I can speak with some authority that the film still holds up. But even with James Cameron swearing that Avatar 2, 3, and 4 will “make you s*** yourself with your mouth wide open” (challenge accepted) and Walt Disney tentatively planning for “Avatar Land” in various parts of their theme parks, it would seem that the chance for Avatar to be the Star Wars of its generation, or really the anything of its generation, came and went five years ago.
That’s okay of course. A great blockbuster movie can just be a great blockbuster movie without capturing the lunchbox market. And considering how often James Cameron actually lives up to his own hype, I am incredibly excited to see what he has in store for our next trip(s) to Pandora. The odd thing is that, despite the fact that Avatar grossed $2.7 billion worldwide, I might be the only one who still cares.
