Avatar is the third-most expensive movie ever made. It had damn well better be one of the top 3 highest grossing films of all time if it’s not going to be considered a disappointment by the Hollywood Big Shots That Be.
Remember: the financial success of movies has fuck all to do with their total gross. What matters is the ratio between money put in and money taken back out. That’s why District 9 and The Hangover going to be considered the biggest success stories of the year, despite the fact that both earned less in ticket revenue than Transformers, Up, or Harry Potter. In the case of District 9, it’ll break $100 million but probably not make it too far past that - but it doesn’t matter, because with a $30 million budget (and even adding in another $30 million in advertising costs), that $100-$150 million dollar gross puts the producers so far in the black that they’re halfway to the prawn homeworld. And that’s completely ignoring the massive additional profits they’re likely to get once the DVD hits.
Meanwhile, Wolverine made $180 million, probably more than District 9 will. But the mere fact that it made a shit ton of money in absolute terms doesn’t make it a hit. It successfully, if only barely, recouped its $150 million production budget, but when the costs of advertising (generally between 50-100% of the production budget) are added in, it’s going to need those DVD sales and ancillary products just to break even. As a result, it’s generally considered a flop.
Nobody’s saying that Avatar will be the next Gigli. But the truth of the matter is that the movie has a gargantuan budget, and will need to be a bona fide phenomenon in order to be seen as a box office hit. Add in the overhyping that Cameron himself has spent the last few years engaging in, and you have yourself an uphill battle that even Spielberg might not be able to win.
Edit: I should add that “flop” != “not profitable.” Virtually all Hollywood films break even, at the very least. The measure of a film’s success is in how much profit it generates, not whether it ends up in the red or in the black.
Yes, I hear she’s a doll in person. Very nice lady.
Tanbarkie That’s true of any investment obviously. I’d be curious to know how much of the cost of the first movie is amortized over the whole franchise. Once models are made they can be stored and don’t need to be made again. Basically I think that people like to watch Space Marines blow shit up. Waterworld of course was unimpressive despite it’s budget. It didn’t look as epic as it cost. It looked as epic as Mad Max with a Titanic budget. I do not believe a James Cameron film could possibly work like that being as every James Cameron movie to this point has seemed more epic than Waterworld.
I think people are underestimating James Cameron’s star power in and of himself.
For all intents and purposes, James Cameron hasn’t been heard from since he shouted “I’m king of the world!” at the Oscars. Sure, there were the two or three IMAX movies and a short stint on Entourage, but otherwise, nothing. The people he has to convince to see Avatar are the ones who have no clue who he is. That includes the people who haven’t thought about him since Titanic.
As Tanbarkie just said, that is a huge uphill battle that Titanic and T2 won’t be able to help. I’m not saying it’ll be a huge flop, but there’s no way this becomes the Titantic-sized blockbuster it needs to be to be considered a “hit.”
In fact, I would bet good money it won’t even sniff the top ten of all-time. Number 10 is Star Wars Episode III at $380 million. Do you really think Avatar, a movie that has little buzz right now outside fanboys (who you yourself say are worthless), can pull in more?
I didn’t say fanboys are worthless, I said they are not the primary driver of ticket sales.
You mean a movie that has very little buzz right now outside of the people who are seeing the trailer for the first time now? This is the opening salvo of the media blitz. By December, everyone will know about it.
I dunno, I’ve been hearing about it for years now but that’s because my wife worked on it.
Whether or not it will match Star Wars episode III I don’t know, but Transformers II beat it…so…
And of course a great way to generate buzz is to have analysts on TV chattering constantly about how it can’t possibly make it’s money back. Of course we don’t know how much of the figures people are throwing around or cost are spread out amongst the whole franchise rather than just the first movie.
We can all argue about it until we’re blue in the face but the fact is we’ll know in a couple months. Even if you make a cogent argument about why it will or won’t gross a shitton, and you’re right, it was still mostly luck. If these things could be predicted with certainty we’d all be movie investors.
Since everyone is just slinging guesses around I’ll throw in my guess and say 60% it does pretty good (gross a little over budget), 30% it “bombs” (gross less or significantly less than budget), 10% it’s a runaway smash hit. The biggest thing it has going for it is that there will be virtually no competition at that time of year.
This. James Cameron may be responsible for creating some of the most beloved scifi action films of the 80s and 90s, but he hasn’t made a movie that penetrated the national consciousness since Titanic, which came out nearly twelve years ago. It’s been a full eighteen years since Cameron’s last big action movie.
In both cases, the stars, not the director, were the focus of rapturous attention by the mainstream public: Winslet, DeCaprio, and Schwarzenegger. Considering that Titanic’s audience consisted primarily of teenage girls, I’m guessing most of the movie’s fans didn’t walk out of their tenth viewing praising the expert direction and visual effects. And they sure as hell didn’t spend the next twelve years telling their younger siblings about the directorial genius of James Cameron.
In other words, there is an entire generation that only knows Cameron as the guy who made Titanic - assuming they’ve heard of him at all. And unfortunately for him, that generation comprises the bulk of his target audience for Avatar. Doubly unfortunate is the fact that even Avatar’s advertising seems to only be aware of his last big movie: the trailer specifically calls him the “director of Titanic,” not the “director of Aliens” or the “director of Terminator 2.”
And triply unfortunate is that, ultimately, most moviegoers just don’t care who directed a given movie. There are maybe five or six directors alive whose names, attached to a movie, are sufficient to sell significant quantities of tickets. Most of these directors have fairly niche audiences: Quentin Tarantino, Spike Jonze, Wes Anderson. Only Spielberg and Scorsese are consistently capable of selling movies to the mainstream on the strength of their name alone, and they came through that ability via consistent delivery of high quality cinema over the course of decades. Cameron lacks that consistency, and as a result, has very little mindshare among the moviegoing public.
Why is this important? Consider Peter Jackson, whose name was bombarded across all media outlets for four straight years as the next Big Name Director. The Lord of the Rings trilogy was uniquely (at least among recent blockbusters) hailed as a great accomplishment in direction. These were movies with an ensemble cast, with few big name actors. The visual effects and design were under the complete control of Jackson’s Weta Workshops, and as a result, most of the praise for Weta’s groundbreaking work went in Jackson’s direction. This was a true filmic phenomenon in which the primary face for the franchise was, against all expectation, the director. Jackson himself was and is an incredibly friendly, charming man, the complete antithesis to the stereotype of the haughty auteur, and was therefore perfectly suited to become the spokesperson for the movies. The LOTR movies received massive critical praise, won a truckload of Oscars, and made a kajillion dollars. And Jackson became a household name… or so the fanboys thought.
When Jackson finished LOTR, he immediately began work on his opus, the movie that he’s been planning for years and years. This was Jackson’s remake of King Kong. Much was made of the incredible new technology that Jackson and Weta were developing for the new movie: dramatically expanding upon the motion capture techniques invented for Gollum in order to create the new Kong, massive, epic vistas that would put the landscapes in LOTR to shame, and stunning monster effects that would set a new landmark for photorealism (stop me if this sounds familiar).
And headlining every bit of marketing for King Kong was the name of its visionary director: Peter Jackson.
You probably remember the rest. The movie opened during the holiday season of 2005, less than two years after Jackson’s previous movie had swept the Academy Awards. The studios predicted nothing less than a record-shattering blockbuster (necessary to cover the costs of the film, which had a budget nearly twice the size of any single LOTR installment). Instead, the movie had a thoroughly underwhelming opening - despite being one of the five most expensive movies ever made, its opening day tally ranked as a measly “21st best Wednesday opening ever.” Ultimately, King Kong just barely recouped its production cost in domestic receipts, despite being a critical darling (MetaCritic score = 81, “Universal Acclaim”). Compare this to The Return of the King, which nearly quadrupled its production budget based on domestic earnings alone.
Peter Jackson is undeniably one of the most powerful names in Hollywood today. Film geeks love him, scifi/fantasy fans love him, and his fellows in the industry love him. But that wasn’t enough for King Kong. Advertising based entirely on Jackson’s name combined with claims of unprecedented special effects magic led to a near-disastrous opening - only relatively-positive word of mouth kept the film alive in theaters long enough to earn back that operating budget.
I wish Cameron the best of luck - the world needs more artists who are driven to recklessly push the boundaries of what is possible. Unfortunately, I suspect that Avatar is headed right down the path of King Kong - particularly since Cameron doesn’t even have a recent hit that he can draw upon in the advertising. Can the sinking ship be turned around? Sure, although it’ll take a dramatic reworking of their marketing strategy (at this point, it’s simply too late to go back to the drawing board on the Na’vi themselves). Do I think it’s likely to happen. No, I do not.
People like to bash Transformers because it was based on a kids cartoon from the 80s, but I’m not sure those people realize just how popular the first movie. Even around here, you’ll read about people who say they don’t normally go for big budget movies saying how much they enjoyed the big, dumb Transformers movie. Combine that with ticket sales from teenagers who just had to see something in the middle of Summer and it became a big hit.
Actually 'tis true. I hadn’t heard of this Avatar until opening this thread and thought that there was another trailer for the forthcoming Avatar: The Last Airbender movie, due out next Summer (and now it seems with “Avatar” out of its name to avoid this very confusion). I really must keep up.
Some excellent points made in this thread. Especially the bit about how a movie’s being a financial success is different than how many people see it - a hugely expensive film has to blow out the box office to be a success. And the points regarding the difficulty of integrating live action and “humanesque” CGI together (I have a hard enough time with 3D - I am one of those people who can’t quite fuse the images all the time leaving me with a bit of a queasy sensation).
The key comments though are the ones that point out that the writing, the acting, and the pacing will be what makes or breaks a movie. Special effects can work in service of that, but if they are not there the movie will suck. Note the difference between the first Star Wars movies and the prequels. Note even that the latest Batman succeeded more on the basis of the depth contained within the characterization of the Joker and suffered more from the triteness of Two-Faced’s characterization, than for its special effects successes or failures. The poster who noted that the human reaction to the Elf was the best part of the trailer and the one who mocked the seems to be likely trite Care Bear planet plot line hit it.
Okay, FX can bring in crowds. GI Joe opened to $100 million worldwide. But then it cost $175 million to produce and $150 million to market. And its following week had its ticket sales tumble hard. Maybe it will make its money back, maybe not, but you don’t hear many talking about it any more.
If viewers see this movie and come away thinking “Wow, cool FX!” then it has failed as a movie, IMHO (even if it is a financial success). If they leave having cared about the characters and having reacted emotionally to them (Yeah, the “I laughed! I cried! I screamed! I was on the edge of my seat!” review) then it has succeeded. I fear the overreaching for certain effects will end up distracting from succeeding in helping us connect emotionally rather than serving to help achieve it, but we will see.
I’d like to see the figures people are throwing out for the cost of this film. What I’ve read is that it costs $200m not $350m. So basically if this movie performs like GI Joe or Transformers it will be a hit.
It appears to be an erroneous report from Time Magazine.
But still, the movie’s budget is still be quoted as somewhere around $250 million, which puts it at number three all-time. The $200 million to make Transformers 2seems almost cheap by comparison.
I’ve only read sub $ 200m. Regardless, under 300m that puts it on par with other sci fi blockbusters. If it’s in the top 20 it’s a hit. Of course everyone will say it’s a flop if it isn’t the greatest thing ever. If it only does well as opposed to stupendously people will call it a flop.
$197 million was the initial budget, everything I’ve seen since then pegs it at somewhere between 240 and 300 million.
Again, that is just so far beyond all but two or three movies released ever that it will have to be a huge blockbuster to not be considered a flop. That’s just the way Hollywood accounting works.
Sort of. People will call it a flop if it makes back the production cost at the the theater, meaning that it isn’t in the black when it leaves theaters domestically. But it WILL turn a profit worldwide and then it will come out on DVD/On-Demand/Blu-Ray etc… and then it will make a profit. So people will call it a flop but still it’ll make huge profit and Hollywood will greenlight another one.
