Avatar: Way Of Water cruises past The Force Awakens to become 4th biggest movie of all time
James Cameron now occupies three of the top four spots on the list of the planet's biggest movies
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James Cameron’s Avatar franchise creeps every closer to total domination of the planetary box office today, as Variety reports that Avatar: The Way Of Water has just passed Star Wars: The Force Awakens—the highest-grossing film in that particular franchise—in the all-time box office gross rankings. That puts Way Of Water, which recently cruised past $2 billion at the international box office, in fourth place overall, trailing behind Avengers: Endgame (at No. 2) and… two other James Cameron movies. (That’s Titanic, in third position, and the original Avatar, which reclaimed its spot at the top of the pile in March of 2021 when it returned to theaters in China, blowing past Avengers in the process.)
Way Of Water is currently in its seventh weekend in theaters, where it is, unsurprisingly, kicking all kinds of shit out of every other movie out there. (Condolences to Puss In Boots and his next-of-kin.) That includes a strong domestic performance—clocking in at a little more than $600 million to date— and a really strong international performance. The highlight of that big pile of planetary currency being a massive $229 million turnout in China, where it’s one of the first Disney movies to play in the country’s lucrative markets in some time.
As it happens, James Cameron told GQ back in November, ahead of his sequel’s release, that his “fucking expensive” movie would have to post these kinds of numbers to be anything other than a loss for the studio. “You have to be the third or fourth highest-grossing film in history,” he noted at the time. “That’s your threshold. That’s your break even.” And break even it now, apparently has; we have to assume that Disney officials are now feeling at least a little less apprehensive about having three more of these things on their docket.
95 Comments
The timing probably isn’t going to work out quite right, but it would be great if it squeaks past Titanic to take third place, only for the Titanic 25th anniversary release to take it back immediately afterward.
They need to rerelease Aliens and T2 next. Would love to see more of Cameron’s genius on the big screen.
We’d have a financial Cameron-ception!
James Cameron is the greatest filmmaker ever. So satisfying how he has put star wars and marvel movies into the grave and shown modern audiences what a real film is. There is still hope in this world when an anti-capitalist masterpiece connects with the audience. The Tulkun are so awesome. Really made Avatar 2 superior to the original and any other big budget action movie.
Now this is just an embarrassing thing to write.
You’re such an obvious troll
I can’t tell if you are being serious or not. The last sentence makes me think not.
One of my coworkers said his favorite band was Black Eyed Peas, and I laughed because I thought he was joking but then I just offended him because he was serious. Not my fault he has horrible taste.
Lol
The number of comments on these Avatar 2 articles have steadily dwindled as all the MCU dopes slink back into their holes after predicting it would bomb, and doing damage control the first two weeks (“It’s not gonna make $2bil! No chance!”) What a bunch of losers, lmao
Both of your factions are pathetic nerds who need to touch grass, stat.
Not directed at you personally but that touch grass expression needs to die in a fire like yesterday. Even better if someone could go back in time and kill it before it was born. Anyone know a guy who could help with that?
“needs to die in a fire” is hardly betterAnyway, here’s dronesensor:
I love cringey comments that are like a defense mechanism against something that isn’t even happening here.
2022: the year of explaining that which goes without saying.
2023: the year of calling out manufactured narratives and outrage.
Fortunately the trolls behind all of this are quite stupid so their provocations are merely tedious once you finish laughing at them.
Don’t ungrey ncbo. He’s a troll marvel incel. He harasses me constantly with racism and sexism. I just dismiss his hateful comments.
Hey Charlie, considering this thread was made by one of your alt accounts and you probably posted here on at least one additional account, maybe you should leave off accusing other people of being trolls.
Oh hai Bobby
something something cultural impact something something nobody makes avatar memes
I guess I’m not surprised but I am… at a loss. I never saw Avatar until I watched it the week before Way of Water came out. It was fine… good even. I mean, a pretty good action movie with really impressive CGI. I would say Cameron himself has made several movies that I thought were a lot better, and Avatar reintroduced 3-D and premium ticket prices so the boost to ticket prices probably helped with its take, but not enough to make it the highest box office take of all time.
Then I saw Way of Water. It was good. For a 3-hour movie it went by easy and I wasn’t checking my watch every 5 minutes. The story is fine. That we’re at a point where I just accept CGI blue cat people as “live action” is pretty amazing, but it’s so impressive that it’s ironically unremarkable. It’s a broadly appealing movie but breaking 2 billion means repeat viewings. I’ll watch again when it’s on streaming probably, but I didn’t think it was so good as to see it twice in theaters. Maybe it’s just one of the few BIG budget movies that actually draws people that don’t care about theaters anymore? I’m not a hater, I enjoyed it and I’m glad it’s doing well as I’m actually interested to see where the story goes, but how does that lead to a 2-billion+ dollar global box office?
Is it just that global box office wasn’t the same in the era of Terminators and Aliens? Looking at the list of biggest global box office, it is DOMINATED by 21st century movies. If the global box office worked the same way, what would Terminator 2 have done, I guess?
Those numbers aren’t inflation adjusted, probably deliberately so that the studios can brag about having a new champ every few years. But like Titanic made over $4 billion in 2023 dollars. E.T. made $2.4 billion.
Yeah, this. There are enough differences in the industry and the world itself that direct comparisons are inherently flawed, but by most estimates on straight inflation-adjusted box office, Gone With the Wind is still the highest grossing movie of all time and has been since 1939, with about $4.25 billion.
I personally think inflation-adjusted numbers are inherently flawed or at best, overly simplified. The websites that provide those numbers just take the average movie price (in the US) from a given year and calculate the increase in price from then to today. Then apply that rate to the box office from back then. But movie ticket increases have not kept pace with actual inflation, they’ve actually outpaced inflation. In 1997, movie tickets were an average of $4.59 each. In 2021, they were $9.16 which is nearly 2x as much. Actual inflation was only 69% (nice). And of course, as price goes up, it’s natural for demand to go down. So we’re not actually comparing apples to apples.The other thing that is never factored in is that there are way more entertainment options nowadays. Most people have multiple streaming services and other home entertainment options that were rarer in 1997 and didn’t really exist at all if you go back to when something like Gone with the Wind came out. That also impacts demand. So to me, it’s hard to assess what box office performance is the most impressive in the same way that it’s hard to compare sports statistics across different eras of football or basketball.
Most of them don’t even go that far and just plug the box office figure into an inflation calculator to get an overall dollar amount. And honestly, that kinda seems more fair than trying to extrapolate to a “tickets sold” situation, for the reasons you mention, and the fact someone else brought up that some movies, like Avatar, charge premiums for fancy tech that means the number of viewers per dollar is lower than it is for other movies.
But yeah, people tend to act like gross, inflation adjusted or otherwise, is a good comparative measure of movies’ popularities. That, at best, works in very broad terms — for telling flops from hits — but is basically useless for fine distinctions. Just taking the Gone With the Wind example that keeps getting brought up:
That movie came out in 1939. Not only were there fewer entertainment options, but there was no certain aftermarket for the box office: no rental, no streaming, not even a television broadcast. As far as anyone knew, you saw it in theaters or you’d die without seeing it, and studios had far fewer ways to monetize it after it was out of theaters. So it had a theatrical run of around two years. By contrast, Avengers: Endgame was on DVD less than four months after its theatrical release and mostly out of theaters by that time. Gone with the Wind has also had nine re-releases spanning a sixty-year period, so it has a huge head start here.
On the other hand, there were only 2.3 billion people on Earth in 1939. If two billion people saw a movie, that’s 85% of Earth’s population. If two billion people see a movie in 2023, that’s around 29% of the population. Those numbers are absurdly high, but the point is a movie that 1 in 20 people see would produce tremendously different absolute totals in different years. I can’t find exact figures, but it’s safe to say that the increasing urbanization of the planet means that far more people, both by percentage and in raw numbers, live within comfortable traveling distance of a movie theater now. I think the absolute fairest measure of a movie’s popularity, which would still be imperfect, would be the percentage of the overall population that had seen it two years after release, but those numbers don’t exist.TL/DR: These rankings don’t really tell us anything and are mostly a promotional tool for the studios.
Well I think its fair to use the rankings to compare modern day movies – certainly what Cameron has accomplished is impressive and a reflection of his understanding of why people go to the movies. I just don’t think there is a way to fairly assess movies across eras. To your point on GWTW – there’s no way to even tell how many unique people saw the movie. Given the only way to watch it was theaters, it could easily have been people watching the movie 5-6x vs every ticket representing one person. Same is true with movies nowadays too. But I think the minimum sites could do is adjust box offices correctly, with some reflection of how movie tickets have outpaced actual inflation. An easy adjustment would be to understand the total number of movie tickets overall sold for a given year and adjust accordingly – because individual movies shouldn’t be punished for overall demand going down due to increased prices or more competition. Really I’d just like to see more thought put into the analysis.
Also bear in mind that lots of those tickets are the more expensive 3D IMAX, which boosts the grosses quite nicely.
there’s no logic here. for whatever reason cameron is really good at making movies that have broadly popular worldwide appeal on a scale that basically no other filmmaker can consistently accomplish. what he likes and wants to see is apparently what the whole world likes and wants to see. and he hasn’t even made that many movies!
It’s even more impressive because the majority of other movies in the top 25 are either Marvel, Star Wars, or Disney branded, all of which have huge subcultures of people who have built their identity around their fandom. If you take out Cameron, you could reasonably conclude that reaching the top ten requires a diehard pre-existing fanbase that sees every release in theaters 3-5 times.
With Cameron, and the Avatar movies in particular, either those diehards are hiding in some place with no real representation in U.S. media — are they huge in Uzbekistan? Bangladesh? — or he’s somehow built one of the most successful franchise of all time out of exclusively casual viewers, an outlier that seems almost impossible.
i think the lesson is – not everything requires ‘die hard fans’, and possibly that ‘die hard fans’ move the needle a lot less than we suppose, or least have inflated the recent stats.
also “twitter discourse” has absolutely no actionable effect on real life, especially when it comes to movies
well right, also seems evident that the ‘die hards’ are not the reason, for example, avengers endgame was so successful. clearly normal people go see whatever is perceived as ‘an event film’, and to them there isn’t a huge difference between avatar 2 and avengers 4.it’s easy to go ‘this was successful because it was the culmination of blah blah blah’, but perhaps it was just: people went to see the big movie, it’s just that the big movies have happened to be marvel for the last 10 years.
I think it’s just important to remember there’s a lot more moviegoing populace than someone like folks here on the Gizmodoverse (like myself) who hang out on the io9 and AVC boards all day. The industry swore Scott Pilgrim was gonna be a big breakout hit because it had a lot of buzz coming out of Comic-Con then only 30 people saw it when it actually came out and a lot of people at Universal lost their jobs.My folks would gladly take in a movie like Avatar and not feel any pressing need to go on a message board and get in a “so what did all MEAN?” conversation about lore.
Not me
Someone here made a great analogy: Marvel/SW movies and shows are like a “residence” that wants to eat up all your free time, and a James Cameron movie every so often is more like a “vacation” where you can just get a beautiful spectacle that doesn’t ask you to supplement it with watching 20 other things before and after it. You just see the movie, go “that was nice”, then go about your life until the next one. Like how movies used to work!
Here’s the thing – I saw this, and really liked it. More than I expected to. What REALLY surprised me was how much my kids, and my kids friends, (ages 9-12) wanted to see it…and they LOVED it. Like, really loved it. A few of them saw it again, taking even more friends along. They play Navi; jumping around and hissing at each other…and the ‘I see you, friend’ thing is now a solid in-joke around the house. Cameron has put something on the screen that somehow speaks to this younger generation that is bigger than the CG spectacle and underbaked story make clear. I’ll tell you this; the next sequels are going to make HUGE money.
What’s weird to me is that the tech/high frame rate was one of the only reasons to see this for me. But clearly not everyone is hitting IMAX hfr screenings to post these numbers. Which means average people are 1. Liking this movie without the gimmicks2. Enough that they’re seeing it multiple times3. Clearly getting some deeper experience from this film than I amI thought it was competently executed but not very interesting. I feel so out of touch.
I’ve only seen it once, but I made sure it was on IMAX. The whole thing was very visually impressive but not that deep. I guess the message was that whaling is bad? I think pretty much everyone but some Japanese and Norwegians are already on board with that.
I really liked The Batman, but I never got the chance for a repeat viewing. Same with this. I’d like to Avatar 2 again, but it takes a lot to get me to set aside 3 free hours again. Where are people finding the time??
This has come across as the movie for mainstream people who aren’t nerdy about movies to me.
I bet against Avatar 2 and Top gun 2. I’m never betting again.
I bet it would make a brajillion dollars. I also bet it would bore me to tears like the first one. Won both bets.
I went all-in on “Joe Dirt 2″. Lost my shirt.
I thought “The Last Picture Show 2″ aka “Texasville” couldn’t lose!
I thought the Generals were due!
I bet on red , man …Wesley Snipes will never let that one go….
Yeah, but being shirtless is the only way to watch Joe Dirt 2 anyway, so it’s a win/win situation…
I bet I can get you to bet again.
I’m quite proud of my confidence in Top Gun 2. Less proud of my confidence in Lightyear. Really thought Pixar could do no wrong
I bet against Lightyear when I heard of it because I wasn’t quite sure who the audience would be for it. I accidentally got that one right but I call that minor. Calling Top Gun 2 is more impressive.
But… but… it has no memes!!
Wonder what the devil plans on doing with Cameron’s soul…
FYI, the Dr. Emilio account posting here is NOT the long-established Kinja account. This imposter account simply uses the name for establishing credentials and then spewing vileness, while also discouraging sane discourse among Kinja posters.
I’m quite sure now that the Bobby Peru account is the one handling most or all of the imposter accounts. There were no comments on this post for hours before three showed up in a fairly short interval (The dronesensor account is almost certainly one of their alts as well) and all three had the same slavishly cartoonish Cameron dicksucking comments that for whatever reason they have decided to make part of their core personality.No idea what to do about it, since nobody in charge here seems to have any interest in even basic comment maintenance. Hell, I’d do it for free, if only for the joy of stifling a few bigots. I honestly think there’s only two or three actual trolls running something like fifteen to twenty accounts.
I think that the Cameron vs Marvel schtick is just a part of establishing a topic for the Bobby Peru/Metal Fingers/Charlie Meadows shill account. The topic simply serves as a part of cover to show that the base account does something other than play political basher over at Jezebel and The Root.It’s supposed to be a 4D chess setup, but instead comes across as pigeons just crapping on the chess board.
Has anyone figured out cosmicghostrider’s deal and why they randomly decide to reply to themselves ten times in a row?
Sometimes I feel like he’s got some Gollum/Smeagol thing going on and we’re just witnessing the two sides of his personality conversing with each other.
But are his eyes going to be as mesmerizing once we see them?
I’m not Bobby Peru lol. He called me out over on The Root. Even trolls are pissed at me!
I’m 50/50 on whether the imposter accounts all belong to the possible Kremlin shill. I see that he replied to you saying it isn’t him, but how hard would it be to have 2 of the sock puppet accounts pretend to fight?Whether the imposter sock puppet is or not, he remains a vile person.
By now, the consequences of having one of these vile impersonations is known. Offline and online.
Offline, a group could be having a peaceful, sit-down, not blocking anything protest to get cops to stop killing people so much, and an impersonator can start breaking windows a couple of blocks away, solely for the purpose of letting said cops to declare a riot and arrest tons of people, possible killing some in the process.Or one of these “Boogaloo” or other hate-people can impersonate someone at an address to 911, getting someone SWAT-ed and possibly killed.Other imposters steal your credentials in order to rob you, or rob someone else using your name.Online, here, they attempt to defame the actual user of the account by trying to present them as vile and hateful. They should be on the radar of the sites’ equity group, as their trash does have the effect of reducing web traffic by discouraging interaction on Kinja. Basically, they are impacting the money in a negative way, long-term. Short-term, perhaps there was a boost, but short-term is gone now.Basically, I see the end-game of these imposter trolls as bringing back the Jim Crow days, as mentioned on The Root, where a White psycho could go and kill girls and as long as someone quickly pointed to a Black boy, that boy would be tortured and executed for it while the psycho got off free.
Hence my use of the term vile to describe the condition of the trolls.I don’t know if Bobby/Charlie is one of them, or if he just serves as a convenient congregation point for them with his own vitriol. I have it at 50/50 that he’s under orders as a Kremlin shill. He (maybe) either does a good job at stirring things up, as far as his boss can tell or he gets to go die in Ukraine along with hundreds of other Russian males every day.
Maybe. He might just be another psycho troll too, that just happens to fit the conduct pattern of Kremlin bots from the late 2010s (but with better English).
Lmao you had me until Kremlin bots. Sigh, liberals.That Russophobia is wild.
Hah, had someone bring up the old “Russians aren’t doing anything, you dumb liberals” line.
Nope, according to them, nobody’s getting invaded, or if they are, they deserved it.
And according to them, nobody recently was beaten to death by police, or if they were, they deserved it.Conservative Faux News brainwashees are just the best at poo-pooing at brutality of all sorts.
I worry for the day when Faux News cuts a deal with Beijing to shill for and deflect from the CCP in the same way they do for Moscow.
Lol seek therapy, man.
Yes, unfortunately Faux-Lizardo learned to tone it down just enough to avoid detection. Used to be pretty obvious when they would roll in and start hurling racial slurs.
There’re several imposter accounts running around that I know of, including one for me.
To all those saying “I don’t get it, what’s the massive/historic appeal”… more and more, I keep thinking of how unapologetically environmentalist and anti-oligarchical these movies are.
Because, sure, lots of movies are anti-dictatorial. Star Wars is a big anti-fascist story, as are most superhero movies, but that’s such a generic theme it’s everywhere. After all, the core ideology and national myth of the world’s most fascist country, North Korea, is that they’re under constant existential threat from the evil USA. And, with its indigenous peoples vs. industrialized colonizers/bows and arrow vs. mech suits imagery, Avatar has plenty of that, too.But what Avatar has and other blockbusters don’t, and almost never even bother to attempt, is its prominent environmental theme. Compare that to Infinity War/Endgame, where the villain is basically motivated by environmentalism. (But, probably because the writers are themselves liberals, they have Thanos give lectures about people going hungry and starting wars, rather than chiding the Avengers for doing nothing to save the rainforests.) Now, I love Infinity War/Endgame, but they aren’t movies that challenge anyone to reject the status quo in any way. The Avengers only battle murder-bots, alien would-be dictators, evil wizards and the like – not polluters, poachers, or carbon-burning gluttons or industries.
And, in a world threatened by looming environmental catastrophe, it turns out that environmentalist entertainment plays well to audiences worldwide. Yeah, that tracks. Should we really be surprised?
Yeah, for all the complaints about this movie being “just Ferngully in Space” and the like, what exactly is the problem with more Ferngully? I’m not even opposed to the glut of superhero content these days, but if we have upwards of ten superhero movies and TV shows a year, why not a few more unabashed environmental screeds?
My reaction to that complaint has pretty much always been “So?”.So what if it is derivative? There’s clearly an audience for that kind of thing, especially if it’s done well and with incredible effects.
Top Gun Maverick is literally the Death Star attack and trench run spread over two hours, but with fighter jets instead of spaceships.It was just done really, really, REALLY well.
Particularly since EVERYTHING is derivative of something. There are only seven basic story plots. Everything boils down to that in the end. It’s what you DO with the story archetypes that matters.
i agree with most of this, but most superhero movies are actually not anti-dictatorial at all. if anything, they advance the idea that what the world really needs is one superior person to singlehandedly determine right and wrong, and fix things for everyone else. not trying to be all freshman-year-dorm-room “rEaLlY mAkEs YoU tHiNk BrO” about it, but that’s how it goes. the only real exception i can think of is Black Panther, where his whole arc is about accepting that he’s been wrong and he needs to listen to the people
If it’s wrong to become sexually aroused by James Cameron’s success at the box office, then I don’t want to be right.
Draw me like one of your Na’vi girls!
Hey, McDonald’s isn’t good food but that never stopped it from making a shitload of money too.
How in the world can you compare Space Smurfs 2, Unobtanium Boogaloo to the terrific pleasure of a Happy Meal???
I liked Avatar and absolutely loved Way of Water, so trust me that I’m not trying to make fun of it, but… it’s weird that we don’t adjust for inflation when calculating top earning movies, right? That’s ignoring serious context. Of course Gone With The Wind didn’t earn as much money as Avatar, there was less money back then. It earned a larger percentage of overall money than Avatar did at their respective times of release.
I think it’s at least somewhat fair to compare it to Gone With the Wind, since for all that ticket prices are much higher these days, GWtW does have the added benefit of being released 80 years ago and had a feedback loop of being so popular that it was shown more often. I think most people probably know it’s the undisputed champ when accounting for inflation, and will probably never be dethroned.It’s more of an issue when comparing to movies in the modern era, since even comparing The Way of Water to its predecessor shows a heavily distorted picture, even though ticket prices are generally comparable across the past two decades. In 2023 dollars, Avatar made over 3.5 billion and Titanic over 3.2 billion. Both of those have seen a few re-releases, but haven’t been played constantly for decades like GWtW.
PR people can’t puff their chest if they adjust for inflation. That’s the whole game
I agree that not adjusting for inflation is weird in one sense, but I’m also not sure it’s any weirder than comparing box office for a country with a population of 130m, that didn’t have TVs, the Internet, etc., to a modern-day country with a population of 330m in another sense. Comparing Avatar’s performance to that of The Force Awakens, on the other hand, is much more sensible. I think a good compromise is to report on the new, non-adjusted global records, but always point out the historic achievement of GWTW.
Well, it is fascinating, and it is also just remarkable timing in that there have been no other real competitors since it opened. I think Avatar 2 is something of a franchise reboot for another generation. I saw the first film, with my spouse before our children, with some friends at an IMAX theater in 3D for the spectacle. She fell asleep, I thought it was spectacle and derivative. No complaints. I’m a dork who likes shiny things.During the pandemic when my kids consumed countless hours of media, I rewatched it for the second time with them on Disney+, and they both actually liked it enough without the gimmicks. So, I took them to IMAX 3D on day one.Today we went to see it a second time to take their cousin so she could see it in IMAX 3D. My wife was a last-minute addition to the party, she hates these things…So, watching it with my wife in the audience, all the Cameronisms were particularly obnoxious. The pseudo-jarhead jargon (Semper Fi, reborn in hell, feeling blue? My son and I joked that they missed out on including a crayon-eating contest, oorah). The slang of an alien family (albeit imbued by a former sky person) in the future sounding like the ‘90s. The 75 minutes of people experiencing things for the first time… like water, and fish, and you know. Can you buy a writer or a bold editor with a billion dollars? That being said—the drive home (radio off, over stimulated haha) included a conversation about my wife’s favorite characters (the one that ‘stared and watched things’, the ‘pregnant water mom’). And no complaints. She hates blockbusters? I’d say that’s a massive success for a film that even I don’t know if I am going to willingly watch again. SO. Again, I think this was just a massive, successful reboot and we are getting to the point where there is going to need to be some actual writing involved. Something compelling. The spectacle of experiencing new environments can’t possibly hold up. Can it?The future movies might just reap this spectacle profit, and people are happy paying for the stationary ride. Or could we see something more like a Matrix Reloaded situation, where everyone gets that first ticket, then realizes that whatever was down the rabbit hole wasn’t worth the dive?Who knows? All I know is that I’ve spent eight hours and a couple hundred on tickets. Kudos to spectacles. (FWIW, watching my son beat God of War: Ragnarök was a much richer and compelling experience lol.)
I think there’s absolutely something to not spreading the IP too thin. I’m a little behind on the Marvel Studios and Star Wars shows/canon cause I just needed a BREAK, you know?But something like Avatar hasn’t worn out its welcome for me because it’s only been out there so much.
Who knew that the world wanted to see a movie about American imperialists getting their @sses handed to them?
Inflation adjusted or tickets sold are both much better metrics than just total box office. Inflation adjusted makes the first Avatar 15th for domestic box office and Way of Water around 50th.
Im surprised its done as well as it has, but its success is still way overrated. Its a success, but nowhere near the top of the list.
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/chart/top_lifetime_gross_adjusted/?adjust_gross_to=2022
I know it’s incredibly cliche to say “I don’t get it.” but…I don’t get it. The first one was fun, and insanely gorgeous. It made 3D movies worth seeing suddenly. I enjoyed it for what it was, and promptly forget about it in all but pop culture references.
This one was pretty much the same; somehow MORE beautiful, but completely forgettable. The story was a beat-for-beat retread of the first one, and for it’s generous runtime it told almost no story and got us close to no characters. I’m a pretty big film buff and pride myself on my memory in general, but gun to my head, I couldn’t tell you the name of 3 of their 4 children, or any other character besides Jake and Neytiri (and I saw it again today a few hours ago).I don’t begrudge any film its success but it does baffle me. I wish I could enjoy it as much as everyone else. With something like Titanic, or Endgame, or Force Awakens, they’re such memorable and powerful films in their respective genres that it’s like, yeah, ok, those are juggernauts. The Avatars are just pretty.
(and I saw it again today a few hours ago).
There’s your answer.
I had a friend telling me that seeing it in 4DX would change my life. It did not (though a few of the systems were broken).
Exactly- just CGI schlock.
The Avatars are just pretty.Yes, that. It’s totally fine to gawk at something for a few hours because it looks impressive and represents the latest in cinema technology. I rewatched Gosford Park the other night and I just love that movie; the characters, the setting, the dialogue, the art direction, the music. But it doesn’t have sparkly CGI space whales, and I think it’s all the better for it.
You apparently didn’t pay any attention to what the story actually was.
This one was pretty much the sameOh look another Death Star
I knew I wasn’t gonna like the story at all, and I still believe that after watching it. Just want to enjoy a 3 hour CGI experience, and that’s what I enjoyed. It was more like a 3 hour Unreal Engine showcase, but I still enjoyed it for that. Especially as someone who loves environmental design and world building. I think that’s the great thing about Avatar, even if one aspect is crap, there’s something for everyone to enjoy.
I just don’t like the way Na’vi look. I can’t call it “bad CGI” because it’s not but it just doesn’t do anything for my imagination. In terms of celebrated character design, this is no baby yoda over here. If it’s your thing that’s fine but I just can’t jam with those gangly blue limbs.
Not even the littlest baby Na’vi? Baby anything seems to work most of the time. Just look at Groot. (And I don’t find him aesthetically pleasing at all.)
I kind of feel this way about Gollem. He’s so gangly. But as far as celebrated character design goes, he’s considered one of the greatest.
One of my favorites is Davey Jones. The tentacle beard! Why has no one thought of that?! It’s genius
It’s not my cup of tea, but ok, apparently people love that in particular outside the USA. Anyway it is important to remember that this is not inflation or price-ticket adjusted. The movie tickets in the USA cost 20% more than in 2019, I don’t know in Europe. And that’s just in comparison to 2019, not 1999. Inflation adjusted I am not sure this movie is even among the 10 highest grossing ever.
Avatar 2 was pretty mid.
The Mid of Water
Avatar 1 was one of the worst movies I’ve seen in my life. Yes, absolutely astounding computer animation. But CGI does not a movie make…it takes a script that engages the audience. And with cardboard-thin characters trapped in a plot that unfolded with the most boringly predictable plots put to paper, the hack script was solid cliches—utterly predictable. I only suffered the flick once in the theater and never since then. So cliched…if a sophomore film school student handed in this script as an assignment, I think he’d get a D. Therefore I can’t build up any steam to bother with Avatar 2. And seeing descriptions calling it a “three-hour demo reel” doesn’t help.