Remember Avatar, that big-budget James Cameron movie with all the cutting-edge visual effects and blue people?
Of course you do, it was – and still is – only the most successful movie of all time, earning over $2.7 billion when it was released 10 years ago in 2009, not to mention the three wins out of nine nominations it got at the 2010 Oscars.
In fact, you’re probably so clued in about all things Avatar that you would have no problem naming who this character is:
He’s only the main character after all.
Or who this is:
Come on, he’s such an iconic baddie!
And of course you should know who this unforgettable character is:
So memorable.
No idea who any of those characters? Okay, can you name what happens in the movie? How about some memorable quotes? The name of the planet? Nah, I didn’t think so. Don’t worry though, you’re far from the only ones.
(By the way, the names of those aforementioned characters are, in order: Jake Sully, Colonel Miles Quaritch, and Neytiri. And yes, I had to Google them.)
Despite having made more money than other iconic movies like Star Wars and Gone With The Wind combined, Avatar has yet to make anywhere near the same level of impact on pop-culture.
In fact, the movie has the dubious honour of being the most commercially successful film ever released that people immediately forgot about. All the expected Avatar merch, theme parks, hardcore fanboys speaking Na’vi, and references in everyday conversations just didn’t materialise.
So what exactly happened? How does a film that captured people’s imaginations around the world for a couple of months be so quickly forgotten?
The simple answer is that Avatar is just a bad movie cloaked in some beautiful packaging. The narrative and themes explored were nothing we haven’t seen before in films that were much better, and the characters and dialogue were as wooden as the door Rose was floating on at the end of Titanic.
Cameron clearly spent a good chunk of the film’s $237 million budget on the visual effects rather than polishing the script and story, and it definitely shows. If you rewatch the movie today, the CGI would hold up just as well as anything released over the last 12 months. The dialogue is still horrendous but at least it all looks good.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be looking at why Avatar was forgotten so quickly (again, it is a bad movie) but rather why it was so successful in the first place.
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What sold Avatar to audiences was some stellar marketing. It was made by a big name director, it was an “original” film (in a sense that it wasn’t based on any novel or IP), and there was so much emphasis on the film being a cutting-edge visual moviegoing experience featuring some state of the art 3D technology.
The marketing was so good that it left people feeling like they just had to watch Avatar in cinemas in 3D or they’ll be missing out on something groundbreaking.
In a way that’s true as Avatar genuinely looked great in 3D, especially in IMAX, but that was really it. There were no memorable characters or even a single quotable sentence like “No, I am your father” to really capture people’s imaginations.
Written by the man who penned the iconic line, “I’ll be back.”
With four sequels coming over the next few years, you just have to wonder if that’s such a wise move. But history has proved everyone wrong before as critics were all predicting Titanic and Avatar to be big time flops, which they definitely weren’t. Who knows, the sequels may all end up making many more billions and all feature some of the best storytelling we’ve ever seen.
But that’ll be for future us to decide. For now, what we do know is that Avatar definitely hasn’t been the pop-culture phenomenon everyone expected. Instead, it turned out to be one of those films that entertained you that one time before fading into relative obscurity, albeit one that raked in more money than any other film has ever made in history.