Pop quiz: without checking, can you name any of the characters from The Abyss? (I sure can’t, even though I thought it was a good movie. Weird how some of his films just don’t have very memorable characters)
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Now we just need another article pointing at the boing boing article, and we’ll have inception-esque levels going on. 
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I cannot.
I just remember it as the “Tall Smurf Movie”.
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That depends on a definition of success that makes me, obviously, quite agitated…
I mean, I probably wouldn’t have commented if it was described as “the most financially successful film of all time”, but without that qualifier, I felt a caffeine-withdrawal impulse to make a fuss about it. But yes, from a strict business perspective, its success is undeniable.
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I think most people understood that to be the implication.
Do you think that there is an objective measure out there somewhere for “most artistically successful film of all time?”
It was pretty good, for a Dances with Wolves, white savior type flick. I did enjoy it, but not enough to pine for a sequel (or 4)
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It was some pretty fancy special effects for the time but there are literal teenagers born after that movie came out who have never known a world that didn’t have incredibly lifelike CGI characters or sci-fi movie franchises set in gorgeous fantastical environments. Visual effects will only get you so far nowadays.
I will be surprised if there is as much audience demand for more Avatar movies as James Cameron seems to believe there is, but his movies have exceeded such expectations before so I guess we’ll all have to wait and see.
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It’s not like popular movies tend to shatter tropes; but, for whatever reason, Avatar seemed particularly ineffective at managing to keep the thin layer of skin it applied to them from slipping right back off the moment you left the theater.
I can definitely remember that there was a corporate dude whose brief dalliance with moral complexity was noting that the population of earth would be better off thanks to the stuff being looted from the noble savages; the gleeful imperialist guy whose brief dalliance with moral complexity was having a scar that reminded him that the noble savages were sufficiently worthy opponents to be worth killing for its own sake not just for the paycheck; the broken soldier who is broken; and the chick wot is a cute noble savage.
I just don’t remember anything about the characters smeared around those concepts.
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I find the description of Avatar as “Fern Gully in Space” quite apt, and off-handedly commenting to my boss as we exited the cinematic team building exercise, “Well, that won’t get a sequel anytime soon.”
He scoffed and pointed out several obvious plot hooks, but I insisted that given its budget and, well, its all too politically correct smugness that it would sit until the next generation of movie execs had enough nostalgia to resurrect it.
I do wonder at 4 sequels. I mean, sure, a PS5 can probably do the same quality of animation as in the original, so they could focus the money on quality storytelling and acting this time, but something tells me that isn’t where this is headed.
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Yeah, so my original comment came from more of an emotional place than rational one (Avatar really triggers me), and I thought I had deleted it, because I didn’t want it to become a whole thing, but my deletion didn’t register (I guess I closed my laptop too quickly?), so now here we are…
My original statement that Avatar is “not the most successful film” and my delineation of the film itself from its hype machine were impulsive but good-faith rhetorical choices for the purpose of earnest and friendly provocation. Yet the internet never fails to make such choices backfire: I worry that my use of a clownish register (shitpost-adjacent, one might say) may have caused you to believe that I actually am some naïve buffoon. I assure you, I am not.
Yep. And that’s often the problem with implications such as this: most people automatically interpret “most successful film of all time” as “most profitable”, because our culture has normalized the oppressive capitalist value of exalting money over everything else.
The “financial” aspect implied in the assertion is, in happy mutant terms, a fnord, one which propagates and reinforces a certain neoliberal mindset that, I firmly believe, needs to be challenged. I hoped to do my part in challenging it by making the fnord visible, by calling out the discrepancy between the quality of Avatar the film and the quality of Avatar the enterprise.
Nope. But I do think we can be more nuanced and varied in how we talk about a film’s success, beyond money. Surely we can imagine measurements other than how much the public got bilked!
This thread already has suggestions for some such measurements, like cultural impact and memorability. Yes, those are not easy to measure, but they lie well within the realm of possibility. Number of viewings, as opposed to ticket sales, is another possibility, as is polling people to find out if they actually liked the movie.
I think there’s a whole universe of metrics, both quantitative and qualitative, that one might want to have on hand for use in an informed discussion of cinematic success. Seems like a fun thought experiment. Like, for comedies, I would much rather define success based on how much laughter a movie incites than on how many tickets people purchased. Are there any metrics you would like to see used, other than box office gross?
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I’m feeling a whole lot of meh.
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My main complaint about Avatar is that we never met the real owner/controller of that planet.
Any system that shares life energy and balanced need would only survive until one form evolves a mutant that can lie about it, even a little. That mutant would have a massive advantage, and would soon take over.
There has to be something keeping the system stable.
I’m not feeling that much meh.
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I feel like people were just excited by the CGI effects and the 3D experience, which although not totally new, were novel to most of the audience because of the immersive cinematography that capitalized on it… all that said I thought it was kinda cheesy. Basically a rehash of ferngully maybe mixed with some white savior type themes… and I feel like people have stopped caring about 3D and are unimpressed by CGI anything anymore. I guess Disney has a lot invested with the rides in florida and their corporate mantra of exploiting IPs… I guess it’s inevitable. I’ll probably stay home.
I noticed something a few years ago. I really like certain James Cameron films, and other ones I don’t really care for at all. The ones that I like are the ones that he did with his then-wife Gale Anne Hurd. Probably just a coincidence.
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Yah, it was pushed hard as “the movie that shows 3D is the future of filmmaking and not a gimmick”. That’s why I went to see it. Turns out both were gimmicks and deserve to die. 
Also, since we somehow made it 36 posts without this, here it is:
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