Why Doesn't Anyone Like Avatar, the Most Popular Film of All Time?
Awww.I guess?
A little while back I was in a Lyft and the man asked me what I did for a living and I said that I wrote about pop culture, particularly movies. He brightened and asked me if there were any upcoming movies that I was looking forward to and being a company man, I said the upcoming Roku Channel “Weird Al” Yankovic movie starring Daniel Radcliffe as the preeminent pop parodist.
The Lyft driver said that he was a big fan of a movie called Avatar and was very excited about its upcoming sequel. He was very earnest and effusive in his love of Avatar and enthusiasm for its sequel.
Otherwise I would have had a hard time believing the man. I would have assumed that I was on Punk’d Candid Camera and Betty White's Off Their Rockers and that Ashton Kutcher, or the ghosts of Allen Funt or Betty White would appear out of nowhere and tell me I’d just been pranked.
That’s because nobody likes the most commercially successful movie of all time, with a box office gross of just under three billion dollars.
That’s right: a shitty movie everyone thought was stupid and hated made more money than any other ever made.
Weird, huh? I vividly remember walking out of Avatar and confidently asserting that it would be an enormous bomb. After all, who the hell would want to see a three hour long movie that was like Billy Jack, only with blue aliens? I wrote up Avatar for my column Forgotbusters over at The Dissolve in 2015 because I was confident that even though Cameron’s heavy-handed science fiction allegory was only six years old it had already been more or less forgotten.
Usually when a movie destroys at the box-office a sequel is whipped up as quickly as possible. Avatar made a record-setting amount of money yet demand for a sequel, or a series of sequels, felt non-existent.
The cry for more space adventures with outer space Native Americans was deafening in its silence.
Cameron was ostensibly working on more Avatar movies but it honestly felt like they would never come out. It has, after all, been thirteen years since Avatar’s release. If it were a Jewish boy it would be celebrating its Bar Mitzvah.
But I recently learned that a trailer for Avatar 2 has been released, which makes me think, for the first time, that it will actually be released at some point.
In what could not possibly be a puff piece planted by the studio, I also heard that Zoe Saldana was so overwhelmed by the twenty minutes of Avatar 2 that she was allowed to see that she cried.
If I were her, I would have wept uncontrollably because I had devoted so many years of my life to a shitty movie but apparently she was very touched by it.
Apparently the reason it’s taken over a decade for Avatar 2 to be released is because it deals extensively with water, which, as Cameron is all too aware, is a tricky to the point of being impossible combination of expensive, time and labor-intensive and dangerous.
When I heard that the Avatar sequel would be water-based I thought that sounded like it would probably look pretty cool.
You know what else looked pretty cool? Avatar. That was all it had going for it. From a technological perspective, it was a marvel that brought the then-red-hot technology of 3-D to a whole new level of artistry and sophistication. From a character and story idea, however, it was a complete dud.
3-D isn’t really a thing anymore, however. It’s the technology of the past once again rather than the technology of the present or future.
Will Avatar 2 bring 3-D back? Possibly. James Cameron is a genius. He made The Terminator, Aliens and Terminator 2. But I disliked Avatar so intensely that it made me feel like Cameron would never make another great movie, just a bunch of Avatar sequels.
Will Avatar 2 surprise me by being good and popular and relevant? Probably not, but I have been wrong before.
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