Was Avatar 2 really the biggest movie of 2022 ?

Big Gerry

Apparently Avatar 2 made over 2 billion at the box office and was the biggest move of 2022.

But I don't know anyone who went to see it.

I find it hard to believe that Avatar 2 was bigger than Top Gun Maverick.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar:_The_Way_of_Water

johnny_ultimate

If you don’t know anyone who went to see it, that’s a good example of the limitations of anecdotal evidence :)

Jim_Hodge

Biggest by quite a margin. Covid delayed many decent films.

2022 Highest Grossing Movies Worldwide - IMDb

Big Gerry

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121751885#Comment_121751885

If I hadn't of known I would have assumed that Top Gun Maverick was the biggest movie of 2022.

I've no idea how avatar 2 was able to make so much money.

gossamerfabric

the last mission impossible was held back not only because of covid but Avatar 2 which was the summer movie of 2022.

johnny_ultimate

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121751903#Comment_121751903

Top Gun was a massive hit in the US / Canada where it made 50% of its money. It did very well for itself elsewhere too, but it was a phenomenon mainly in the US.

Avatar 2, in contrast, was a massive hit right across the world - making over two-thirds of its money outside the US / Canada domestic box office, including big money in the likes of China. Maverick never even got a Chinese release - unsurprisingly.

Big Gerry

Another thing about Avatar 2 is that it came out at the end of 2022 while Top Gun Maverick had a whole summer to make money with many people going back to the cinema to watch it a 2nd time.

Avatar 2 was only in the cinema for about 2 weeks in 2022 yet somehow it managed to outperform Top Gun.

~Rebel~

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121752202#Comment_121752202

These things are done by year of release - so it's not a question of what movie earned the most in the calendar year of 2022, it's what 2022 released movie earned the most.

speedboatchase

Are we still doing the 'Avatar has no cultural impact' argument ffs? I went to see it, OP, so there's one. It also had a 14-page thread on here.

loyatemu

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121752760#Comment_121752760

ever seen an Avatar meme? ever reference it in conversation? I was surprised Avatar2 was such a big hit (I guess Cameron does know what he's doing more than internet randos) but I think the lack of cultural impact thing is fair comment. After the first movie had left the cinemas you very rarely heard it discussed until the sequel was announced and then most of the discussion was around how such a huge movie could have been so forgotten.

Big Gerry

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121752760#Comment_121752760

I think that the only real impact Avatar had was that it started off the 3D craze of the 2010s.

For awhile it looked like all films would be in 3D and even Television was going down the road of 3D.

But now nobody talks about 3D and you can't even buy a 3D Television.

~Rebel~

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121753126#Comment_121753126

Think you're really downplaying Avatar there... for one thing I can never see Papyrus without thinking of it 😅 (of course inspiring one of the great SNL sketches). In fairness to it, it was a one-of-a-kind cinema experience that I think is far more viscerally memorable than most big action movies. Sure, it's not a great movie in terms of narrative, but it was a significant experience. Gravity with atmos is probably the only comparable sort of all-encompassing visceral cinema experience i've had since.

It's that same experience that brought everyone out to the cinema for Avatar 2 - in an era where so many people just wait to watch at home, everyone knew Avatar 2 in cinema was the only way to watch it, and that you'd get something different out of it. Again, not a great movie, but christ those water sequences alone were just mesmerizing.

They're more like long-form narrative theme park rides than movies, but they do what they do very effectively, and they get people to come out for it.

AMKC

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121753607#Comment_121753607

Thankfully people started to see sense and realised what a silly gimic it was.

~Rebel~

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121753829#Comment_121753829

Absolutely, should never be anything other than an occasional niche novelty. 99% of the efforts at it were atrocious.

loyatemu

other than Avatar, the only films that stick in my mind for the impressiveness of their 3D are How to Train your Dragon and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and as I had young kids throughout the early 10s I saw a lot of 3D movies (I threw out about 20 pairs of 3D glasses just last month).

Flinty997

Personally I liked that they tried 3D.

I tried it, our TV was 3D, and I got a 3D Blu-ray to try them. I enjoyed it, but couldn't watch more than about 40 mins before it wrecked my head. I think I saw one or two in the cinema and it was just ok.

I gave up on it because I couldn't buy a 3D TV after that and obviously couldn't watch it for very long.

I really like Avatar 1. It's a scfi classic for me. Avatar 2 though was fairly meh.

Agent Coulson

It made $250m in China at the box office.

Top Gun 2 wasn't screened in China.

speedboatchase

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121753126#Comment_121753126

The 'cultural impact' thing is meaningless and basically just refers to online discourse. Morbius had plenty of Twitter memes and traction yet lost tons of money. Meanwhile no-one knows the names of the Jurassic World leads and that trilogy made billions too. People tried to make this argument before Avatar 2 released, in the expectation it would flop because no one in their online circles cared. For some reason, Cameron is always underestimated. The cycle will begin again before Avatar 3, which will gross billions too.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121752760#Comment_121752760

I don't think there's any argument that people went to see the film - clearly they did and to the tune of about 4 billion across the two movies - but the question remains: what's the legacy here? Where is the "Discourse" or anything coparable to the kind you see with IPs like Marvel, STar Wars, DC - and so on?

There's a theme-park world, and a couple of video-games yet beyond that nobody talks about Pandora, there are no TV spin offs (you'd think in this era of streaming landfill someone would have pushed a show by now if there was enthusiasm) etc; christ I don't see anyone cosplaying as Navi, or neckbeards ranting about it on YouTube. It's this odd franchise that clearly makes a shít tonne of money, then disappears from the zeitgeist.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121754151#Comment_121754151

In slim defence, when done right 3D had value albeit extremely limited; the problem was the vast majority were those awful post-processed conversions that rendered the films, at best, too dark to enjoy.

speedboatchase

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121757241#Comment_121757241

Unlike Marvel, Star Wars and DC, it's one of the very few - perhaps only - major movie franchises created by and fully under the control of its creator. So in Cameron's case, the sequel was ready when it was ready, whereas Disney's strategy clearly revolves around at least a Marvel or Star Wars show every quarter made by irrelevant jobbers to keep the share price stable. Cameron said similar in the Way of Water's press cycle:

“When you have extraordinary success, you come back within the next three years. That’s just how the industry works. You come back to the well, and you build that cultural impact over time. Marvel had maybe 26 movies to build out a universe, with the characters cross-pollinating. So it’s an irrelevant argument. We’ll see what happens after this film.”

Avatar is - at least for now - fundamentally a movie franchise and its two movies so far occupy the top three highest grossing movies of all time. Decent. You will probably see more of the regular 'cultural impact' fanboys tropes - comic con crowds, Halloween costumes - as the sequels are released just a few years apart. But at the moment there are pretty obvious cases of its impact (directly - $5bn+, indirectly - inspiring the look of things like Horizon: Zero Dawn) that don't adhere to the usual DC/Marvel metrics.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121757296#Comment_121757296

For sure and you can imagine that when he passes Disney will probably try to amp up the Avatar "content", assuming the third film maintains the weird streak of "financially succesful with minimal cultural discourse".

Maybe that's then the cultural impact, ultimately: it's a "James Cameron film" and those are quite rare when you actually sit down and look at his CV. There is a shrinking cohort of directors out there whose name alone can get bums on seats, with Chris Nolan being the most obvious latter-day example while people like Scorsese has to whip he collection tin out; Avatar's on-screen breadth is certainly vast and worth remembering the weird cycle of "Pandora Depression" that cropped up, but perhaps without the extra spice of it being a Cameron joint the films wouldn't ever have succeeded as much.

Heck if they weren't directed by Cameron it's debatable they ever would have been good films in the first instance. We'll probably see that with the first post-Cameron Avatar, directed by ... I dunno, some anonymous MCU alumni.

loyatemu

Timeline of top grossing films. I think it's fair to say, all the others have had more cultural impact than Avatar (in the case of the Avengers, the MCU has had a massive impact on cinema even if Endgame itself is just another MCU film).

Homelander

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121753829#Comment_121753829

It's not a gimmick when used right; unfortunately the vast majority of the time it was done and used extremely poorly, which killed interest in the medium.

The 2009 Avatar was an absolutely incredible experience and Avatar 2 is more of the same. I can't imagine thinking either film is anything other than average watched in 2D on a normal screen.

johnny_ultimate

I think that outside of the arthouse space (where you got masterpieces like Goodbye to Language and Long Day’s Journey Into Night in 3D) Avatar and its sequel are some of the only Hollywood films where the tech is used for a formal purpose rather than just a gimmick. Cameron builds his worlds and shots around the tech, rather than it just been ‘oooh 3D’. The underwater scenes in 3D HFR were genuinely breathtaking, and I say that having been horrified by the tech in The Hobbit.

I think off the top of my head Ang Lee is the only other major mainstream filmmaker who used the tech in the same thoughtful, nuanced way Cameron did. And Way of Water is a whole lot better than Gemini Man.

Liam O

I watched Way of Water on an entry level 4k TV at home and it blew me away.

The original Avatar was almost hypnotic in the cinema at times.

I certainly think there was a huge cultural impact to the first one. Shame it didn't lead to something more widespread with the tech.

Foxtrol

It will be interesting to see how the upcoming Avatar movies do.

An 11 year gap between 1 and 2 was massive enough to naturally build interest, especially with the 'what can they do now' questions based on the progress in technology. Hard to replicate that with a much tighter turnaround in future, where jumps in tech will likely be minimal.

Someone earlier likened these movies to a theme park ride and that resonates with me. Visually they are stunning but for me the characters and story are pretty forgettable - which drives the lack of cultural impact beyond the box office numbers.

The question is whether people continue to sign up in such large numbers if the 'ride' of the visuals are similar and the story isnt interesting.