Avatar has become only the fifth film in history to breach the worldwide $1billion mark. After weeks of pre-emptive nay saying, cynicism and ominous predictions, Avatar has smashed all expectations and reeled in a mighty billion dollars in just seventeen days, faster than any other film, including Cameron’s own Titanic, still the highest grossing movie of all time.
After such a protracted absence from feature films, Cameron (and his producers) will be pleased to learn that his brand of epic audience-pleasing cinema can still draw in the masses. Avatar’s success comes just one year after The Dark Knight reached the same figure, though Christopher Nolan’s comic book tour-de-force took 33 weeks (and an IMAX re-release) to get there. The ‘noughties’ have seen a great number of films reach preposterous levels of financial success, and whilst some will point to the distortion of inflation and the rapid increase in ticket prices as the primary factors behind this, the figures are nevertheless incredibly impressive.
The way things are going it wouldn’t be too daring to predict that Cameron could smash his own records and knock Titanic off the number one spot. Every now and again a film comes around that captures something with a mass audience. In Avatar’s case the epic scale and the prospect of seeing Cameron’s new technologies in action have undoubtedly contributed to the film’s success. Cameron loves making films for everybody, and with Avatar he’s done just that.