Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.
Avatar, James Cameron’s 2009 masterpiece (yep, I’m serious) once again the highest-grossing film of all time at the global box office, a title it lost to Avengers: Endgame in 2019.
Avatar had held the crown for almost 10 full years—grossing US$2.7897 billion worldwide, before the possibly final Avengers film and culmination of Marvel’s Infinity Saga barely overtook it, grossing US$2.7902.
How is this possible exactly? Well, Avatar is currently seeing a rerelease in China, where it has already grossed millions. As of yesterday, it has grossed enough to reclaim its title.
Mixed title/crown metaphors notwithstanding, what’s clear is that Avatar should and will remain the top grosser for the forseeable future, until the inevitable day that Disney, which also owns Avatar since gobbling up 20th Century Fox in 2009—which I think they called a ‘merger’—decides to drop Endgame back in theaters for perhaps its 10th anniversary, and the two can continue to trade the top spot.
As Miranda July wrote in Me You and Everyone We Know: back and forth, forever.
Avatar, to put it plainly, also deserves to be the number one film of all time—if that’s a thing that one can deserve—purely because, for one, adjusted for inflation it did in fact gross more than Avengers: Endgame, which came out 10 years later.
Two, Avengers: Endgame may be the culmination of 11 years and 22 films in the kind of storytelling the world has never seen at that scale, ultimately a victory not for a single film but for what the Marvel Cinematic Universe has achieved as a whole—similar to when Return of the King won Best Picture implicitly as a way of honouring all three Lord of the Rings films. Not the box office is an award of quality, of course.
Endgame also doesn’t hold up to rewatches as well as the film that preceded it Avengers: Infinity War, which offers more to chew on in terms of storytelling on its own, as well as tremendous character building with Thanos, who is a hollow shell of himself in Avengers: Endgame.
Avatar, on the other hand, is the culmination of the extraordinary career of a visionary filmmaker in James Cameron, who built a world on a massive scale that displays his boundless imagination and technical prowess, delivering a film that showed what 3D and modern CGI technology could do, giving the world a big-screen film that Hollywood has learned from and tried to copy ever since.
Because of that, Avatar probably deserves more credit than it gets for helping save the cinema-going experience by giving the world a template for the kind of event film that must be seen on a big screen, something the world will need even more when the Avatar sequels start releasing over the next few years.
I’m also going to make one more point—Avatar is the better film. Though in the minds of many its reputation has drifted a bit from what it was in 2009, it deserves to be rediscovered and appreciated for its simple, timeless and masterful storytelling and mythmaking, as well as its laudable commitment to environmental protection and anti-warmongering.
Avatar is back in cinemas in China in part because the country is hungry for more films in cinemas as it recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic, with a number of films such as Detective Chinatown 3 and Hi, Mom becoming huge hits.
Films in the Middle East such as Tom and Jerry and have also been able to continue to bring in patrons, while rereleases are also happening in the region, such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy remastered in 4K which is currently playing across the UAE.
Avatar star Stephen Lang spoke to a journalist who may look familiar last year at The National about the making of the Avatar sequels.
“I’m working now with a much broader canvas than I was with the first Avatar, and it keeps me in concert with James Cameron to really go to town and examine the character in detail. That, to me, is totally tremendously satisfying and challenging,” Lang told me.
Lang also said that he expects Avatar 2 to take the box office crown again. Perhaps Avengers: Endgame will drop to number three, when it’s all said and done…
Those in the Middle East who want to rewatch Avatar, head over to OSN, where it’s now streaming.
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