Avatar vs Pop Culture

    In December 2009, I was surfing the IMDb message boards for Avatar, set to release in a week. At the time, the conversation on these boards centered mostly around the film’s mammoth budget which represented a colossal investment for the studio, an investment it was sure to never see returned. Noting how the movie was set to release against the Alvin and the Chipmunks sequel, one commentator even lamented how tragically hilarious it was that rodents covering pop songs could draw more tickets than the finest cutting-edge film techniques offered by the chief architects of modern culture, and wasn't that a shame?

    I’ve often wondered what happened to this guy ...

By the time I finally got around to seeing Avatar myself, the film had been out for over a month, and the discussion around the film had been universally celebratory. It was actually the Monday after I saw the film that I was browsing the web in Spanish class and I saw the headlines that Avatar had in fact eclipsed Titanic as the all-time box office champion over the weekend. Who knows? Perhaps my ticket was the one to push the movie over the threshold. I was just in time to join the ballyhoo.

But it was around this time that the rhetoric around the movie did a 180.

    Overnight the conversation went from “Holy crap! You have got to see Avatar!” to “I just don’t see what the big deal is.” The message boards and the YouTube comments suddenly started becoming obsessed with finding creative ways to flash their disinterest in the movie (I think my favorite was a thread title "A Feast for the Eyes But Not for the Mind") and congratulating each other on not remembering Neytiri's name. And when Avatar lunchboxes never flooded the shelves, the backlash only emboldened. Before long, there was little doubt that Avatar was a $230 M flash in the pan.

I've spent ten years trying to make sense of the Avatar paradox, how the film is so consistently scorned by the very same movie goers who made it a phenomenon in the first place. I myself get around to seeing it roughly once every year and a half--a respectable rate on my calendar for a movie that isn’t Tangled. I used to think that maybe it was just a difference of opinion, but I've been listening to these talking points for a good ten years now, and I can't help but think there's something deeper at work. Something that has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the film.

  I've heard varying reports on what exactly it is that makes Avatar such an unforgivably bad movie. These will occasionally land on comments like "Have you ever heard such clunky dialogue? Don'cha wish they'd spent all that money on the screenplay haha?" 

    But the dialogue in Avatar is no less cultured or refined than generally liked action movies, including the "good" James Cameron films like Aliens or the "Terminator" movies. (Someone show me the line in Avatar that is cornier than "Game over, man! Game over!") But this kind of investigation was always going to be fruitless because at the end of the day, it isn't really Avatar's quality that people take issue with. It never was.

Avatar’s difficulty in taking hold in the public consciousness has less to do with the merits of the film itself and more to do with how abruptly it was asked to stand next to more seasoned cultural mythologies. Nobody hates Avatar, they just hate that is made more money than their favorite movie, and they really shouldn't.

Anatomy of the Backlash

Avatar is a 2009 sci-fi epic directed by James Cameron that follows former marine, Jake Sully, who ships off to the distant planet of Pandora. On this jungle planet, Jake is mentally linked to an avatar, an organic body resembling that of the native alien population, the Na’vi, allowing his consciousness to inhabit this body as the humans seek peaceful negotiation with the indigenous clan.

When Jake earns the respect of Neytiri, the daughter of the chief of the local tribe, he is permitted to learn the ways of the Na’vi, and despite himself he begins to fall in love with this Garden of Eden. As the tensions between the two worlds escalate and war seems imminent, Jake must decide to which world he really belongs.

There's a lot about this movie that is very impressive within the space of narrative and storytelling. Like 90 percent of the characters are military or military-adjacent: they're tough and cynical and have probably never even seen Bambi. But the story allows these guys to experience a full awakening of human emotion as they are swept up in the beauty of Pandora--and without casting their natural roughness as inherently a bad thing.     I find that starting point to be very useful because what good is this whole sermon on the importance of nature if you can't deliver that message to someone who actually needs it? A lot of these cowboys would not necessarily consider themselves to be very in touch with their emotions or at all receptive to the kind of spiritual awakening embedded in this story, but this is what makes their eventual transformation so satisfying. This is one thing I wish we could talk about more with this movie, but the culture would claim Avatar for very different purposes.

Critics of the film adopted the narrative that the film's pop culture reign was nothing more than "a flash in the pan," but the most interesting aspect of Avatar’s box office performance was actually its sheer persistence. Avatar actually didn’t have remarkable box-office harvest in the beginning. This was in part due to a snowstorm that overtook most of the East Coast of the U.S. and shut down a number of theaters opening weekend. The New York Times reported on the film’s opening day:

“That total is on a par with movies that are not built around pre-existing brands. But it falls short of expectations for such a buzzed-about picture, given its higher 3-D ticket prices, positive reviews and Mr. Cameron’s résumé.

    That same day, Box Office Mojo reported “Avatar is not likely to see similar longevity” to Titanic, then the highest-grossing film, but time told a different story.    

    As its run continued, the film's weekly drop hovered between 27% to 2%, a far cry from the typical 50% drop we expect from movies like this. Avatar did not drop more than 40% until early March, its 12th week in release, wherein it was still in the top 5 movies performing. People just kept filling the theaters. It wasn’t until its 8th week in release that someone else took the #1 slot at the box office. (The movie that stole the reigning spot from Avatar in case you were wondering was none other than Dear John. What a world.)

    Some will argue that people only sat down for the film for its theatrical sensory overload, but they probably aren't considering Avatar's aggressive DVD sales. It sits at the fifth highest-selling DVD release, putting it just behind The Dark Knight and ahead of most Pixar movies and all the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.

    Avatar was not a movie that was "supposed" to break all the records, but it did anyways. Suddenly we had a new wing in the pop culture temple overnight, and that could have been an exciting development, proof that we can still be surprised by the box office and that there's always room for one more at the top.

    That is not how pop culture chose to receive this movie.

    Past box-office winners had become a sort of canon, like pop-culture scripture for the millennial audience, and Avatar was the first film in this age of Twitter to claim the ultimate box office crown. That this film would swing in and swipe the holy grail of the box office left members of other fandoms reeling at Avatar’s audacity. Suddenly, the fans of these various franchises all had something in common: Avatar, this new kid on the block who six months ago didn't have so much as a trailer to its pop-culture bank, had taken what was rightfully theirs. Something had to be done.

    And so, fandoms collectively retaliated by turning the movie into a punchline, the primest example of how box office doesn’t equal quality. Anything to let the world know Avatar does NOT belong next to Star Wars in the pantheon. This is where the fight against Avatar started to become unfairly stacked. People weren’t comparing Avatar against individual films so much as entire mythologies. And this is also where you get to see just how partisan and slanted the dialogue around Avatar became. 

    “I’ve grown bitter about Avatar and its box office and critical success,” writes Dalton Baggett in his piece for Medium. “This bitterness mostly comes from a place of deep personal bias as I believe that all of Avatar’s box office records belong to more worthy films, such as those taking place in the Star Wars galaxy." He goes on “comparing Avatar and the original Star Wars should be a felony offense. Star Wars not only advanced the technology of movies and changed them forever, but was also the beginning of one of the greatest science fiction stories ever told.”

Basically, we’re not comparing Avatar against the 1977 film so much as against receiving our first lightsaber toy, watching "A New Hope" for the first time on dad’s lap, or seeing the teaser for "The Force Awakens" with family over Thanksgiving. There is a sort of circularity to this argument that leaves a newcomer like Avatar with no viable entry point: Avatar can never be as good as Star Wars because it doesn't have the longevity of Star Wars because it's not as good as Star Wars ... But Star Wars achieved its nostalgic deification over forty years. We gave Avatar a month.

One whole month.

From this space of resentment, three major arguments against the film started emerge justifying its exclusion from the grown-up table of pop culture--1. It’s just Dances with Wolves in space 2. People only like it because it looks pretty, and 3. It just doesn’t deserve to be the highest-grossing film of all time--and it is from these three arguments that we will launch this discussion.

1.  It’s Just Dances With Wolves in Space

The first major talking point tends to be Avatar's similarities to films like Dances with Wolves, Disney’s Pocahontas, Ferngully, and The Last Samurai. I'll say upfront that this argument has always felt stale to me because already we have cauterized any kind of discussion on archetype, inspiration, or universal truth--things that any person who has actually studied film loves to think about. But if that is the framework we are resigned to, I might as well disclose that I myself have seen all of those films, and with the possible exception of Dances with Wolves, I enjoyed Avatar more than all of them.

     I actually caught Dances with Wolves several years after I first saw Avatar. Given how the internet had basically accused Cameron of plagiarizing the film, I’ll admit I was anticipating losing some of my zeal for Avatar. But after the fact, what I remember is being surprised at how different they were.

    I was surprised, for example, that John Dunbar requests to be stationed at the frontier so he could see the wild west before it disappeared. John already has a romanticized view of this world, contrasting against Jake, who even midway through his study with the Na’vi comments “I hope this tree-hugging crap isn’t on the final.” I was also bracing myself for the moment when the Sioux turned their backs on John just as the tension rises in a “you will never be one of The People!” moment, but nope! not in this movie.

    Both films offered uniquely memorable sequences, like Jake’s taming of and flight with his ikran or John’s buffalo hunt with the tribe. The movies actually have wildly different endings: John and his wife, Stands With a Fist (who incidentally is characterized very differently than Neytiri), flee for the safety of a tribe; Avatar ends with the colonists returning to earth as Jake is once and for all initiated into the world of the Na’vi. There's a certain "Mad Libs" similarity to the two films, but that is kind of cutting the movies off at their knees, certainly not the behavior we tolerate when discussing our own favorite stories.

    (And on the topic of Dances with Wolves, I will acknowledge another grievance aired against both films has to do with the trope of the "chosen one" white guy swooping in to save the natives, and ... I do think there is something there to be unpacked, but I also think that such a discussion deserves a different framework from what I can provide in this particular space, so I'm choosing to save that conversation for another day.)

     Perhaps you have had the experience of arguing with a roommate or relative who didn’t care for "Lord of the Rings," "Star Wars," or "Harry Potter" because they felt they were all just the same story: chosen one (probably an orphan), magic world, dark lord, friendship conquers all, and the like. Those of us who love storytelling know that it’s the details, the things you miss in the two-sentence summaries, that really give a movie flavor and identity and make it worth loving. 

    Both Luke and Harry have to overcome their respective Dark Lords, but Luke learning to trust his instincts and allow The Force to flow through him is a different experience than Harry learning that love is more powerful than death. Hence one person might prefer Harry Potter over Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, or just as likely enjoy all three for different reasons. Yet for Avatar we’re just not willing to give it that wiggle room.

On the Waterfront (1954), Baby Driver (2017)

    Avatar is not the first film to have similarities to other films. The “tough guys with hearts of gold saving the day” motif featured in nearly every genre or locale before Guardians of the Galaxy discoed its way to the big screen, and Ridley Scott’s Alien was literally billed to the studio as Jaws in space. Stories are just assemblages of a million different moving parts, and no assemblage can say that it is made up of entirely original pieces. Screenwriter, Paul Schrader, said in a writer's roundtable, "That’s all we do. You’re picking and choosing, you don’t actually originate anything. You just go through this huge buffet of cinema and make your own plate. And everybody’s plate is different."

    The key is the creative arrangement of that plate. Consider for example what it does to transfer a Western-style story (indigenous population vs colonization) generally rooted in the past and drop it in a futuristic setting, implying that our appetites for consumption and exploitation still run unchecked today.

   Avatar also draws upon ideas and story elements that are not necessarily easy reaches. Avatar juxtaposes Jake's questions of belonging and loyalty against this dichotomy of dream vs reality, a motif much more commonly found in musicals than science-fiction or action-adventure films. Both Avatar and Dances with Wolves follow a character who effectively becomes another person as he immerses himself in another culture, but Avatar turns this metaphor literal by having Jake literally take on a new form in order to access this world and the marvels it contains.

    Jake comes from a world that has replaced humanity with machinery, a favorite starting point for Cameron's films. Jake tells us that the only thing he ever wanted was something worth fighting for, something he was lacking in his world of endless consumption, and it’s only when he falls down the rabbit hole and into the lush paradise of Pandora that Jake finds what he’s looking for. When he does, he can’t help but be blinded by the light.

    This is another reason why it doesn’t at all feel like studio hype or arrogance to call this some variation of “the ultimate cinema experience.” Because … this is the function of cinema at its barest. This dream world that someone like Jake can only access by closing his eyes, and us only by going to the big screen? That’s cinema. I don't want to get ahead of myself because we're about to talk about the visuals in the next section, but ... reveling in the spectacle of Avatar’s 3D landscape is a part of the narrative experience. That is what allows the audience to sympathize with Jake’s elation as he crosses into the incandescent world of the Na’vi.

    More than any of those other films typically discussed as Avatar ancestors, Cameron's film reminds me of something like The Wizard of Oz. Both follow someone stuck in a drab and dreary world who enters into a fantastical otherworld that feels too vibrant and magnificent to be true. Yet in embracing this magical sphere, they confront their deepest fears and insecurities while also unlocking their truest selves.

    But "Oz" kind of gives the viewer a copout by suggesting that Dorothy's magical playground really did all exist just in her head. Its net worth is nothing more than an exercise in hypotheticals.

    That's kind of what Jake thinks about this other world. The film goes out of its way to liken the experience of going off to sleep and being lost in some fantastical REM hallucination. Jake effectively has to go to sleep in a mechanical bed in order to access this land of wonder and beauty--a world that is dazzling, but perhaps too fantastical. As he says at one point “Everything is backwards now, like out there is the true world, and in here is the dream.” This begs the question, is Jake’s newfound freedom in the world of the Na’vi too good to be true?

    This is one of the reasons why it's so satisfying at the end when Neytiri is finally sharing the same space as Jake's human body instead of just his avatar, when the membrane keeping Jake from this fantastical world is finally torn. It wasn't just a dream after all. Avatar and "Oz" fundamentally ask the same question, but frankly, I've actually always liked Avatar's answer more.

    Honestly, one of the major reasons why the organized pushback against Avatar bothers me is that so much of it directly attacks central tenants of what has always made the filmgoing experience such a fixture of culture. It tries to convince you not to get swept up in the stunning images that pass before the screen, and not to feel for the characters on the other side of it trying to learn about such things as love and truth. Even if it was only very recently that we learned how to replicate that so realistically onscreen, we have been marveling at all that is beautiful about moving pictures for a long time now.

 

2.  People Only Like It Because It’s Pretty       

    When asked to explain why Avatar was so popular when it clearly had nothing to offer, detractors inevitably point to the immersive 3D world of Pandora as its sole merit. “Avatar’s effects were good,” the conversation goes, “but that's about it.”

    Avatar is hardly the only movie to experience this. If ever a visually groundbreaking film floods the box office, there inevitably emerges a narrative of how said movie has good visuals but terrible story. It’s never just that the visuals are good, but that the visuals are its only asset. The movie can actually have a perfectly fine screenplay with clean character arcs, clear motivations, and a solid three-act structure, but that will never speak louder than the chorus from the operahouse boxes crying "Why couldn't they just spend that money on the screenplay?"

    And anyone who's seen a Roland Emmerich movie knows what kind of filmmaking sort of thing is supposed to be guarding against. But this line of thinking has become a ready-to-order excuse to hate anything popular. As a result, movie lovers have been made to feel stupid if they see something pretty and think, "Oh! I like that!" As though film wasn’t a visual medium. As Barry Langford puts it in his book, Film Genres: Hollywood and Beyond:

The Sound of Music (1965)

“Spectacular elements have often been understood as tending to narrative redundancy or even interfering with narrative integration, interrupting the flow of the story by encouraging spectators to contemplate the technical achievement of a spectacular sequence—scenery, production design, special effects, and the like—at the expense of empathic involvement in the characters and the unfolding plot ...

“In fact, narrative and spectacle have always existed in a two-way relationship. As much as classical Hollywood narratives focus on compelling central characters through whom narrative incident is focalized, ample space still exists for the narrative to pause and take in, for instance, large-scale tableaux that aim to impress the spectator by advertising the opulence and scale of the production.”

    The specific ambitions of Avatar also play a role here. It's not just because we're bored and want some shinies to look at--the film is making a point about nature as this treasure trove of splendor, something worthy of awe, admiration, and protection. We see the glorious vistas on the big screen and understand why Jake would leave his old life behind to protect this space. That is storytelling. Detractors can parrot how "Avatar's visuals do all the heavy lifting" without ever realizing what a victory that actually is.

    Unless that movie is My Dinner with Andre, every movie relies on spectacle to supplement its dialogue to some degree. The exact mixture depends on the intention of the director, the motivation of the text, and the needs of the genre, but we've been drinking from this fountain for a while.

    A common slant against the movie and its $230 M dollar effects is that "all the money in the world can't buy true artistry." They're right, but to try applying that to Avatar reduces one of the most sophisticated filmmaking processes to a single number.

    Ask anyone working in, say, animated filmmaking, and they will tell you something along the lines of "animation is an artform--animators are actors too." This puts Avatar in a somewhat unique position because the chatter around the motion-capture has always been that the "animated" performances here are all direct translations of the actors. The line has been that we are seeing Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, and so on. The animators are not creating the acting in the same way they are in what we'd normally consider an "animated film."

    But that doesn't mean that the effects team is not pouring their heart and soul into the making of this film. There are, as one example, lots of problems posed by having to coordinate the scaling and positioning of the human world and the Na'Vi world. These are roadblocks that the animators here get to solve with creativity and application.

    And that's nothing to say of the many, many set pieces that need to be drafted from the ground up, things the animators have complete control over. Something else that critics tend to glance over is that a movie isn’t just designed to look “realistic,” but to develop a language through which it communicates meaning and theme. The Na'Vi could have hypothetically been pink or green, but this mystical sapphire coloring goes a long ways to reinforce this dreamlike atmosphere this scenario depends upon. 

    There are a lot of instruments in this orchestra (color, form, texture, etc.), and getting it right is more than just a matter of having fancy computers. It requires knowing not only what information to convey, but also how to communicate that in a way that is effective, pleasing, and novel. Take a look at how “The Art of Avatar” describes the Hammerhead creature, for example:

    “This beast features a rapid threat display, in which an explosion of color fans out from the solid bone transverse projections on its ten-foot-long head. Early 2-D explorations, at best, only hint at the thundering grandeur called for in the script . . . Creature designers often employ a more subdued, camouflage color palette: the bright, flamboyant themes found in all of Avatar’s creatures are a unique departure.

    “‘Jim had a very specific goal. He knew he wanted a bony mass upfront because this creature was going to hammer its way through the forest,’ says Neville Page about the aptly named Hammerhead. Cameron also wanted this Pandorean herbivore to be more bull-like, kicking up dust and stomping at the dirt. Andrew Jones and Dave Clayton (both animation directors at WETA digital) were largely responsible for infusing it with bull-like movements. Clayton suggests that even though a lumbering, thick limbed creature would most likely just trot off, the initial scene with Avatar Jake called for the Hammerhead to flee, so a gallop was thought to be more effective."

    Multiply that by every creature, character, and plant on Pandora, and you can start to get a sense for exactly how big the creative process was for this movie.

    "But maybe," you might argue, "all this effort should have been used to develop the characters! Like, give them some real backstory!" This is another one of those arguments that doesn't really know what it's advocating for. Is Jake Sulley something of a blank slate? Sure. But also consider that … maybe that’s the point?

    Jake’s life effectively begins once he ships off to Pandora, and he doesn’t really come into himself until he starts to embrace the way of the Na’Vi. What little context we do need for him—that he’s a disabled war veteran who’s been left behind by the system, that his twin brother is the reason why he’s on Pandora in the first place—is all established early on. The real engine of the story is Jake’s true character emerging as he aligns with a cause he believes in.

    Specificity with character adds personality, yes, but only to an extent. At some point, it all just becomes homework. Ten years into the MCU, a lot of these guys come preloaded with plenty of what we’d call “backstory,” but have you ever tried to rope someone into the Marvel game with Captain America: Civil War? Is more character information always a plus?   

    And either way, James Cameron’s not the first guy to try using this trick. Jake Sully has about as much backstory as Jack and Wendy Torrance from Kubrick's The Shining. Everything we need to know about these guys going in can be described in one or two sentences, and that's all we need. Those two come with a lot more history in the novel--the details of their marriage and Jack's demons. But consider that 1. books and movies are different machines, and 2. actually dropping most of that backstory in adaptation does not make their story any less interesting to the audience.

    This, of course, all culminates in what is probably the most damning argument lobbed against Avatar and its mega-budget effects: "I just don't feel anything watching this movie. What good are all the fancy visuals if the film doesn't mean anything to me?" The very subjective nature of this argument makes it very hard to disprove, which is probably exactly how some people prefer it. 

    Sentiment is a highly personal feature of film. It is perfectly reasonable to believe that a person's emotional frequency might just not attune with Cameron's. That said, it is also well within the audience's power to abuse this argument and simply refuse to engage emotionally with the text and then lay all the blame on the hands of film itself. As far as whether that's happened with Avatar, well, I have my own guesses ... 

    Avatar as a film is not lacking for emotional moments or sequences. You have those soaring airborne scenes with Jake and Neytiri that make me really want to visit Avatar-land at Disney World, and then you have emotionally devastating bits like the destruction of Home Tree. This scene especially makes the case for the integration between cutting-edge visuals and empathetic storytelling. The detailed rendering of the tree crashing down synergizes with the motion capture of the Omaticaya people despairing at the razing of their home. The visuals do not compete with the film's emotional core--again, the two currents actually run together.

     Really, this sort of talk has been used to denigrate the cinematic artform literally since the beginning. Back in the days of silent movies and nickelodeons, there were bands of critics who turned their nose up at these moving picture atrocities that lured in the poor dumb proletariat who just didn't know any better. The same thing happened when sound started infecting the movies. And again with color. 

    Even back when cinema's toolset was significantly more limited than it was in 2009, it was still the ambition of artists of the day to craft lavish, visually stunning adventure-epics like The Thief of Bagdad with Douglas Fairbanks. This is one way where Avatar is actually not doing anything new. It's just the next step in a progression. And as we get further away from Avatar and see all the attempts Hollywood has made to recreate its effect, I don't really see Avatar as the best example to make this very tired, very sloppy case. 

    The common thread with fan criticism against the movie is singling out some neutral quality of the film, or even one of its strengths, and phrasing that to make it sound like incriminating evidence. But the fact is, lots of movies share connections to other movies. Lots of movies show enthusiasm for spectacle. 

    But something that Cameron's film doesn't have in common with Dances with Wolves, or even most other spectacle movies, is that it became the highest-grossing film ever made. And it was only after Avatar broke that ceiling that the backlash really began. In a twisted way, becoming the highest-grossing movie of all time was one of the worst things that could have happened to Avatar’s public image.

    But where things get really interesting is not how Avatar won the crown, but how it lost it.

    

3.  It Just Didn’t Deserve to be the Highest Grossing Film

    As the imminent box-office feast of Avengers: Endgame approached, there was naturally talk about this movie with its legions of devoted followers being the one to finally dethrone Avatar and replace it with a more worthy title. And why not? The Marvel Cinematic Universe was basically the defining cultural force of the 2010s.

    But where Avatar did “reasonable” its first week and just kept delivering, "Endgame" followed a more firecracker approach. Moviefone reported a month into the film's run:

"It’s slowed down more than we all expected," Shawn Robbins, chief analyst at BoxOffice Media told THR of the hit Marvel movie.

Robbins first expected "Endgame" to eclipse "Avatar"’s record in mid-June. Now he thinks it may not happen until Labor Day, if at all.

 

"Avatar" spent 7 weeks as the number one film, compared to "Endgame's 3-week reign. It was also a steady earner, spending over 60 weeks in theaters and receiving a late summer re-release more than half-of-a-year after its December debut.

"Endgame" doesn't appear to have that kind of staying power so far.”

    It was only after "Endgame’s" conquest was in doubt, and after all the fans already had their chance to see the movie five times in theaters, that #BeatAvatar started trending, and people rallied around the notion that if everyone saw "Endgame" just one more time we would never have to talk about Avatar ever again, and that was enough to push it over.

    But it should be noted that ... nothing about this process was organic. It was not a natural response to how audiences received the film. It was a fandom coming together to tip over the claw machine vendor until they got the prize they wanted. Disney itself got in on the game by launching a re-release with extra unfinished footage before the initial release had even concluded, a push that even fans admit was shoddy and desperate. Still, Avatar detractors got what they wanted, and on July 21st, 2019, "Endgame" booted Avatar from its throne.

    But here’s one element of the box office conversation that has gone under-discussed. Until Endgame’s box-office campaign, every film that had been “the highest-grossing film”—from Avatar to Titanic to Jurassic Park to Gone with the Wind and everything in between—had been an original film. Maybe an adaptation of a book or a play, but it was new to the world of film. Avengers: Endgame, the apotheosis of the franchising web, was the movie that broke that trend, and it only did so after we sunk our hooks into its wheezing torso and towed it over the finish line.

    Given how our movie-scape only continues to grow more defined by remakes and reboots, and with the real possibility that soon remakes and reboots will be the only movies playing in theaters at all, who knows if we’ll ever have another original film take back that crown. Oops.

    Unlike with "Endgame," no one set out to make Avatar the highest-grossing film of all time. There was no #BeatTitanic movement. Two weeks into the film’s run, James Cameron himself didn’t think it was “realistic” to expect the film to overtake Titanic. Avatar’s success, or at least the scale of it, was a total surprise, an exciting suggestion that maybe capturing the public’s attention wasn’t as rote as tethering a movie to a cinematic universe. Avatar claimed the crown because people wanted to see the movie, and however internet sourness spoiled the conversation later, people at the time were happy with what they saw. From Scott Mendelson’s 10 year retrospective on Avatar’s success:

“Like Star Wars 32 years prior, Avatar was an original sci-fi fantasy adventure, a cinema-first blockbuster that soared because it looked good, offered unique unto itself cinematic pleasures and delivered on what its obsessive auteur had promised for over a decade. That it didn’t spawn a multimedia empire has been seen as evidence that its success was a fluke, and maybe it was. But ten years later, that it wasn’t capitalizing on generational nostalgia or a prior cinematic glory has only made it that much more special compared to the blockbusters that followed.” 

Avatar couldn’t just be a new perspective on a timeless story, or a display of immaculate filming technique, or a movie that just happened to win the lottery. The internet had better plans ...

I have to imagine we’re worse off for punishing this film the way we did. If "Endgame" was deserving of our laurels while Avatar was not, and if "Endgame’s" coup of Avatar’s title really was the people taking back what was theirs, what are we really saying about what we want from Hollywood? 

"One of the People"

    Despite the cold shouldering, Avatar has managed to grab onto a few monuments of pop culture presence. The property enjoys a theme park presence at Animal Kingdom at the Walt Disney World Resort. Even my friends who hate the movie who’ve been there have conceded they were "technically spellbound." 

    But Avatar's unusual impact also shows up in places the studios didn't necessarily anticipate. Did you know, for example, that there is an online community of people who speak the Na'Vi language? Or that they've got conventions and everything?

    Did you also know the film has been used as a symbol for resisting real-life oppression and aggressors? Consider something like the protesters in Bil’in, Palestine, who took on Avatars of their own by dressing up as the Na’vi while opposing their real-life conquerors (video here). Henry Jenkins notes the phenomenon in his piece “Avatar Activism.”

“The Bil’in protesters recognised potential parallels between the Na’vi struggles to defend their Eden against the Sky People and their own attempts to regain lands they feel were unjustly taken from them ... The film’s larger-than-life imagery, recognised worldwide thanks to Hollywood, offered them an empowered image of their own struggles. The sight of a blue-skinned alien writhing in the dust and choking on tear gas shocked many into paying attention to messages we often ignore.”

    Repurposing pop culture icons as ammunition for advancing a chosen cause (e.g. using Disney Princesses as advocates for women’s rights) has been a part of the 21st-century fabric for some time. But when you see it applied to Avatar, "the highest grossing movie that no one thinks about anymore," it makes you wonder ...

From the set of Avatar 2. Nope, I don't know what's happening either

    With the Avatar sequels (finally) in the heat of production, in what James Cameron promises to be an epic family saga, maybe the multigenerational mega-story the masses have been demanding will step out onto the stage, and the gatekeepers of pop culture will finally permit Avatar to sit with them at the grown-up table.

    Yet, I worry sometimes that whether the sequels do or don't do what Cameron has promised, the damage has already been done. Given how the movie is almost more well-known for the criticisms lobbed at it, maybe the public just won't give the films the time of day, haters will assert that they told us so, and Pandora will fade into nonexistence.

    At the risk of committing a felony offense . . . when Star Wars claimed the box-office crown in 1977, it was a singular entity, not the trilogy of trilogies what with its expanded universe novels and national holidays. It just told a familiar story about good and evil transposed onto an immersive new world brought to life with cutting-edge filmmaking technology. It was permitted to grow into its pop culture empire organically because people were excited at the possibilities it represented.

I'll repeat, personal taste is an active agent in what films an individual deems classic--I am not trying to paint it as a moral failing if you personally do not like Avatar. Neither am I claiming that no one can ever have a legitimate critique of the film. I am suggesting that we consider how the state of modern fan culture would be different if back in 1977, audiences walked out of Star Wars mumbling, “sure, the effects were nice, but does ‘King Arthur in space’ really deserve this success more than Lawrence of Arabia?"

    What a shame that would have been.

                         -The Professor