The Avatar Conundrum
A few weeks back, social media was consumed with a question that I simultaneously find annoying and intriguing: does anyone like or remember the 2009 movie Avatar?
The answer to that question should be simple. Since Avatar is literally the top-grossing film of all time then OBVIOUSLY people like it. If they didn’t like it, then it probably would not have made more money at the box office than any other film in movie history.
People don’t ask whether anyone likes or remembers Thriller, do they? Nobody asks if the New York Yankees have experienced any success in the post season.
Avatar is a different story. I vividly remember walking out of it and confidently predicting that it would be the biggest flop of all time because nobody, but nobody, wanted to see some cheesy-ass three hour long Billy Jack in Space nonsense.
I was wrong in the sense that it was instead the biggest hit of all time. It wasn’t just an unprecedented box-office smash and pop culture sensation. It was critically acclaimed as well and was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.
To say that Avatar made a cultural impact would be a profound understatement. I remember hearing stories about Avatar super-fans being suicidal because they could not inhabit the film’s fantastical world and had to live on this crappy planet with a bunch of jackass human beings.
Yet only a few years after Avatar dominated the box-office like no film before or since and was nominated for a fuck-ton of Academy Awards I wrote about it for Forgotbusters, a column at The Dissolve on commercially successful films that had receded culturally to the point where they had been at least half-forgotten.
When I wrote that Space Jam was forgotten in the column’s first entry readers were apoplectic. How dare I insist that a movie sacred to multiple generations of earnest young men and furries was somehow forgotten?
But when I wrote that nobody liked or remembered the most commercially successful movie ever made people seemed to agree.
We’re only a few months away from the Christmastime release of the record-setting blockbuster’s sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water and the lack of excitement and anticipation for the long in the works follow-up is deafening.
At Dragon Con last month I did not see a single person engaged in Avatar cosplay, nor did I see much in the way of Avatar merchandise.
When I was coming up with movie to cover for Forgotbusters, I relied on my gut instinct as to whether or not a movie was fondly remembered, hated or forgotten. It was a profoundly subjective project but there are objective criteria for how well a film does.
There is, first and foremost, the box office and Avatar is of course the top grossing film of all time. But there’s also the critical consensus and awards. By all of these criteria Avatar did exceedingly well. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and scored a more than respectable Rotten Tomatoes score of 82 percent (in a weird bit of synchronicity, its audience score is 82 percent as well) and a Metacritic rating of 83 percent.
Here’s the thing: commercial success grows increasingly less important with time. I often think about Pat Boone, who dominated the pop charts in the mid to late 1950s and scored a bunch of number one hits.
Yet NO ONE talks about Boone these days, whereas a band like Big Star, which achieved no commercial success whatsoever, is hailed as one of the best and most important rock and roll groups of all time.
That’s true of contemporary reviews as well. They’re less definitive judgments on a movie’s ultimate worth than first impressions captured for posterity. The critical first impression of Avatar was overwhelmingly positive, particularly where technology and 3-D was concerned. Hell, I DESPISE Avatar and I will be the first to concede that its use of 3-D was spectacular and ground-breaking.
Avatar elevated 3-D to exhilarating new heights. In the thirteen years since the film’s release, however, the 3-D boom came and went. It proved to be a passing fad rather than the next step in film’s evolution.
Oh goodie!
The critical opinion of Avatar has cooled considerably. It’s the kind of movie that now has defenders and apologists rather than unabashed fans.
Movies either grow or shrink with time. Think of a movie like Office Space or Idiocracy. They were exceedingly small when they came out but have only grown with time. They’re now revered as quintessential cult classics.
Once a movie reaches a certain size, however, there’s nowhere to go but down. Take E.T. At one point it held the title of top-grossing film of all time and is still a beloved movie but it has shrunk with time in no small part because that level of popularity is impossible to sustain.
That’s even more true when it comes to Avatar. The sequel could be every bit as successful as its predecessor but I would be shocked. It feels like the Avatar franchise has shrunk to a fraction of its former size and popularity in the years since its release. It’ll be fascinating to see when the sequel comes out just how much it’s shrunk and what that means for all of the Avatar sequels to come.
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