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The King James Victory Parade - Avatar: The Way of Water and sequels

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what are you two worried about it has no cultural relevance

you should know this because people have been talking about how it has no cultural relevance for ten years
 
I feel some people are salty that others think Avatar strangely didn't have permanence culturally despite being the highest grossing movie of all times. Like, to compare, Titanic was a similar smash hit and highest grossing (at the time) movie by Cameron and people remember lots of this movie years later. The difference with Avatar is at least worth asking about because it's interesting to examine.
 
Eh… I'm not really sure how much I'd consider random people online complaining about it evidence that's it's actually widely known.
 
Geckonator said:
I'm with Cloak here for once, what the fuck.

If the next generation of American professional filmmakers are treating Avatar as their big generational touchstone then Hollywood is even more doomed than I thought and deserves it even more than I thought (the latter is really saying something).
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I dunno, Avatar does still come with heaps of directorial craft. The story is pretty trite and rote, I think, but then compared to heaps of other stuff that comes out there is at least a base level of... functionality.

Based on that, I think there are plenty worse foundation stones to start from.
 
This kind of belies the much longer running issue that is the separation of "spectacle movie that makes the most money domestically" and "acclaimed movie that wins the most Oscars":
1989-2004=16 out of 16 best picture winners make 100+ million, 12 out of 16 make 200+ million, 3 out of 16 are the biggest box office draw, including Titanic.
2005-2019=4 out of 14 best picture winners make 100+ million. Zero make so much as 200 million.

Which is sad because both elements are important. While things like best picture, director, and acting might be the most prestigious awards, there is a reason there is also a pile of Oscars for production values, ones which the big action flick movies still often win or even sweep. Movies, especially ones that are supposed to be Oscar worthy, are intended to be spectacles. That was supposed to include everything from elaborate costumes and SFX to actors chewing the scenery and compelling narratives.

And while I might comment on how Avatar has been a relative flash in the pan it might as well be glowing nuclear red giant compared to something like The Hurt Locker. I guess we'll find out soon enough if Avatar was a flash in the pan due to its mediocre story and acting that relied more on SFX to wow people, or if it was more just it being a singular one-off rather than a full-scale franchise like Star Wars or other Disneyopoly nonsense.
 
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Ford Prefect said:
what are you two worried about it has no cultural relevance

you should know this because people have been talking about how it has no cultural relevance for ten years
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I mean, I had not meaningfully heard about Avatar in any online space since around 2013.

I didn't go looking for it.

But despite the all seeing YouTube algorithm knowing that I'm into scifi, the first time I saw anything about it was my mom watching the new trailer on our living room TV.

I hadn't even heard about the 'no cultural relevance' thing until about two months ago, but yeah, given my experience it sounds about right.
 
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Old Spice Guy said:
Lol Star Wars. Come on, your own avatar.
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So if a movie isn't obsessed over like Star Wars* (also part of a neverending franchise at this point, mind you) then that must mean its some sort of failure on the movie's part and making a sequel to it is some sort of baffling move? That sounds unreasonable given public interest in the sequel is high notwithstanding the lack of this. So what does it matter?

*A movie that's like a literal moment in history as far as cinema is concerned for all sorts of reasons, never to be matched before or since in impact for all sorts of lightning-in-a-bottle once in a lifetime reasons

Like if the argument is that "well this movie was well liked but it wasn't something like Star Wars" - ummm ok? The overwhelming majority of movies released in history aren't Star Wars or even close to Star Wars either. This isn't noteworthy. It's actually most movies that aren't part of an interminable Brand (TM), which was the point.
 
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Vympel said:
So if a movie isn't obsessed over like Star Wars* (also part of a neverending franchise at this point, mind you) then that must mean its some sort of failure on the movie's part and making a sequel to it is some sort of baffling move? That sounds unreasonable given public interest in the sequel is high notwithstanding the lack of this. So what does it matter?

*A movie that's like a literal moment in history as far as cinema is concerned for all sorts of reasons, never to be matched before or since in impact for all sorts of lightning-in-a-bottle once in a lifetime reasons

Like if the argument is that "well this movie was well liked but it wasn't something like Star Wars" - ummm ok? The overwhelming majority of movies released in history aren't Star Wars or even close to Star Wars either. This isn't noteworthy. It's actually most movies that aren't part of an interminable Brand (TM), which was the point.
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You have thoroughly missed my point. Avatar is genuinely weird in that for a movie that was everywhere for a couple of weeks in 2009 (and I remember, because it was a hell of a spectacle) and made such a shit ton of money then just...didn't spawn anything major in culture that I can think of (until now of course). I find that odd and so I want to talk about it.

You seem to be taking this as an attack and I just do not understand why.

E: Corrected from 2008 to 2009. Which kind of shows my point I guess?
 
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Old Spice Guy said:
You have thoroughly missed my point. Avatar is genuinely weird in that for a movie that was everywhere for a couple of weeks in 2008 (and I remember, because it was a hell of a spectacle) and made such a shit ton of money then just...didn't spawn anything major in culture that I can think of (until now of course). I find that odd and so I want to talk about it.

You seem to be taking this as an attack and I just do not understand why.
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Fair enough. And it would have been 2010 (Avatar was released in December 2009) - but to narrow it down to the most successful films, the reason this seems 'weird' IMO is because the overwhelming majority of films now are franchise/sequel fare which are inseperable from public perception of their brand, and that has the case for 20 years now.
 
There's a lot of interest in an Avatar sequel precisely because the first one was so seemingly devoid of long-term relevance. The first Avatar was genuinely groundbreaking and changed the future of the medium with its graphical ambition but it failed to compete on an emotional, narrative level. This is something a sequel can resolve, hence the high interest. James Cameron is a man who cares deeply about pushing the boundaries of filmmaking and Avatar is very experimental, it's just that the boundary he's pushing is inherently very transitory. Avatar will forever be that movie that looked very good in 2009.

The worry for this movie is that it took so long to come out that the landscape of filmmaking has moved around it. Does the general audience care about this kind of thing anymore? People loved Thanos in Infinity War and Endgame because Josh Brolin and the CGI team put a ton of effort into making Thanos a highly memorable and extremely well-captured cgi monster dude so that's the sort of standard that Jake Sully is now going to be up against. The rest of Avatar will certainly look better but if the characters aren't able to capture the same appeal it will leave the audience cold again.

Did you know part of the reason this film took so long to come out was that James Cameron insisted they develop, from scratch, a completely brand new method to do motion capture underwater? To me, this is indicative of the trend of Avatar's influence as a franchise. You don't really want to make 'your own Avatar' like you want to make your own MCU or your own Star Wars. Rather what you want is to film like Avatar with the tools of Avatar and then go off and do something completely unrelated. Lifting pretty much nothing from the movie itself but everything from the way it was created behind the scenes.

I don't think we're fully appreciating that the reason franchises are so big right now is because of the cultural impact of the MCU. The MCU isn't popular and culturally relevant because it's a franchise, it's the other way around. Franchises have become the industry's go-to measure of success and cultural penetration because the MCU was such a massive phenomenon. Star Wars retooled itself to become the MCU. Harry Potter retooled itself to become the MCU. DC movies retooled themselves to become the MCU. Hell, the Fast and Furious franchise retooled itself to become the MCU. We haven't even brought up the half-dozen-odd efforts that went nowhere and nobody remembers like the Tom Cruise Mummy movie.

I think Avatar 2 and maybe more importantly Dune pt. 2 could end up being an important historical moment for the industry (though even Dune has an attached TV series greenlit already iirc). If they do well they might convince people to abandon the currently played out feeling franchise model and go back to making epic spec-fiction series. The thinking right now seems to be to move this stuff to TV ala GoT/WoT/LotR. This is part of the reason I really want Dunc II (or 3 since apparently he wants to do Messiah) to a) be really good and then b) sweep the awards season like RotK did in 2003. Some kind of shock to the system feels deeply necessary right now and I think we're ready for it with the MCU kind of falling back a bit in Phase 4 and most other franchises petering out at about the same time.
 
Vympel said:
Fair enough. And it would have been 2010 (Avatar was released in December 2009) - but to narrow it down to the most successful films, the reason this seems 'weird' IMO is because the overwhelming majority of films now are franchise/sequel fare which are inseperable from public perception of their brand, and that has the case for 20 years now.
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This is where my point about ANH comes in because the letters my Dad has are him talking to his buddies who didnt even like scifi and saw no more Star Wars films still talked about it 20years later.

I saw Avatar in December 09 and from what I remember, so did everyone including people like the above. My confusion is that it didn't develop this cult following and become a mass media franchise. Where was the tie in media, hell the Halloween costumes? I've seen more from Casablanca and Gone with the Wind tbh.

I think its depth. Now if this one has some, that'll be great. But I will be a bit surprised tbh, because from the admittedly little info I've seen, its again all about the effects. And honestly to make me go and see sequel after sequel reasonably sequentially (the time between 2 and 3 is supposed to be a couple of years) then I need (and I think I'm far from alone) more.

Honestly, what I want is David Attenborough presents Pandora. That would tick all my boxes.
 
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Delirium said:
There's a lot of interest in an Avatar sequel precisely because the first one was so seemingly devoid of long-term relevance.
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I mean, a film about short-sighted industrial development in the pursuit of profit destroying the environment is as relevant now as it was then. Which is to say, extremely. :V

Old Spice Guy said:
I saw Avatar in December 09 and from what I remember, so did everyone including people like the above. My confusion is that it didn't develop this cult following and become a mass media franchise.
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I'm going to say something that may sound a little strange given my previous posts, but: it is fine when a movie is just a movie.
 
Ford Prefect said:
I mean, a film about short-sighted industrial development in the pursuit of profit destroying the environment is as relevant now as it was then. Which is to say, extremely. :V



I'm going to say something that may sound a little strange given my previous posts, but: it is fine when a movie is just a movie.
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I've tried to be clear that I don't think of this as bad, but I do think of it as weird. Like I said, just for the hype and the money and the enjoyment at the time...where did all that energy go? Why was this not self sustaining?
 
Delirium said:
The worry for this movie is that it took so long to come out that the landscape of filmmaking has moved around it. Does the general audience care about this kind of thing anymore? People loved Thanos in Infinity War and Endgame because Josh Brolin and the CGI team put a ton of effort into making Thanos a highly memorable and extremely well-captured cgi monster dude so that's the sort of standard that Jake Sully is now going to be up against. The rest of Avatar will certainly look better but if the characters aren't able to capture the same appeal it will leave the audience cold again.
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I think people loved Thanos because he's in Infinity War and Endgame, two pretty medicore films that don't have much going for them on pretty much any narrative level whatsoever but which are widely loved because they're the culmination of people's investment in a franchise that had been going for more than a decade at that point. I mean the character isn't exactly complex or deep. I don't credit the idea that Thanos was some standard making / paradigm shifting performance whatsoever, personally. On the technical and performance level alone, Davy Jones in Pirates was clearly superior. Heck, Thanos isn't even up there with Jar Jar Binks in terms of technical signfiicance (by which I mean trailblazing innovation etc). It's pretty stock standard work at this point.
 
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With regards to Avatar's cultural relevance, how is Disney's Avatar world doing?

This isn't meant to be a gotcha, I genuinely know nothing about it other than Jenny Nicholson's video. Presumably it wouldn't have been made if there was no interest for it, but I don't know if it ended up a success or not, though the pandemic may have thrown a wrench in things.
 
Oksbad said:
With regards to Avatar's cultural relevance, how is Disney's Avatar world doing?

This isn't meant to be a gotcha, I genuinely know nothing about it other than Jenny Nicholson's video. Presumably it wouldn't have been made if there was no interest for it, but I don't know if it ended up a success or not, though the pandemic may have thrown a wrench in things.
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I know very little about Disney World, but from Defunctland's Fastpass documentary, the data on Animal Kingdom indicates that the Avatar Flight of Passage ride is by far the most popular attraction in Animal Kingdom. So yeah, Avatar seems to have held onto huge spectacle points.
 
I never got why they didn't bump the brightness up to compensate for the 3d glasses. Only movie I remember doing that was Dredd and I don't think that was conversion?
 
Old Spice Guy said:
I've tried to be clear that I don't think of this as bad, but I do think of it as weird. Like I said, just for the hype and the money and the enjoyment at the time...where did all that energy go? Why was this not self sustaining?
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I'm not sure anything is really self-sustaining, except for, I don't know, Roblox. While people remember and will discuss films they used to like, the persistence of things like Star Wars, Gundam, Disney princesses, etc, is that there's basically a continual output of content (or at least products). To some extent part of the reason why Call of Duty is still significant in 'the culture' is just that it releases every year. Same thing with Fortnite. To some extent this is a social platform for kids (though maybe less than it used to be, at least going by my nephews) and so it perpetuates on that basis, but if the infinite content spigot was turned off, do you think it would have the same position in a couple of years?

To stop myself from rambling on about my budokai tenkaichi theory of early 21st century dragon ball, what I'm getting at is that Cameron has had two interests in the series since the original film's release: film sequels, and the theme park at Disney World. If there had been, say, an Avatar the Game 2: Electric Blue Boogaloo, and an Avatar the Game 3: Electric Blue Boogalee, then the landscape might look different. Instead, it's just ... a film.

stratigo said:
were people really?
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Yeah.
 
Like to touch on something related to what Delirium said above, back when the big Avatar sequel deal was announced, I remember someone comparing it to the MCU, but this really is just a series of film sequels. You know, like we used to make before all of cinema was melted into mush :V
 
Ford Prefect said:
I'm not sure anything is really self-sustaining, except for, I don't know, Roblox. While people remember and will discuss films they used to like, the persistence of things like Star Wars, Gundam, Disney princesses, etc, is that there's basically a continual output of content (or at least products).
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Identical to Avatar discourse is GOT discourse post Season 8. A reliable way to garner clout on twitter is to do some trite post about how "GOT vanished from the cultural conversation after Season 8 because it was so bad."

Except it didn't, in large part because these posts were so goddamn common and garnered so much engagement, and again, a lot of popular TV shows aren't continually widely remembered and discussed unless there's a continual output of stuff relating to them.

Would anyone be talking about stuff in the (phenomenal) Breaking Bad if Better Call Saul wasn't airing right now, and how long do people think visible conversation about either will go on in 'pop culture' or whatever we want to call it after the series finale of BCS later this year?
 
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I remember trying to find some amount of Avatar stuff a decade ago and I found a handful of deviant art groups, an article about people wishing they could live in the setting, a decently sized community surrounding the Nav'i language (which is a pretty sick conlang) and the wiki; largely it's just not a movie that stuck around in fandom form. And that's ok honestly, it's probably for the best that not a ton of people are dressing up as Indigenous American coded blue cat people. Sometimes a movie makes a shit ton of money and people decide not to base their whole personality around it.

I won't say it disappeared culturally though, it just had the impact of any other movie that didn't make a gorillion fucking dollars. Contexts I've seen Avatar discussed in detail include: The White Savior and Noble Savage tropes in media, Speculative biology, conlanging, the cycle of gimmicks in cinema and the evolution of the theatre going experience, people searching for and discussing all of it's cut and lost content, discussions about ballooning budgets in film, its advances in motion capture and so on. On the other hand the meme about people forgetting it is pretty funny though.
 
Ford Prefect said:
To stop myself from rambling on about my budokai tenkaichi theory of early 21st century dragon ball, what I'm getting at is that Cameron has had two interests in the series since the original film's release: film sequels, and the theme park at Disney World. If there had been, say, an Avatar the Game 2: Electric Blue Boogaloo, and an Avatar the Game 3: Electric Blue Boogalee, then the landscape might look different. Instead, it's just ... a film.
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I mean, the same can be said about Alien(s).

Yeah, there were comics and games, but their penetration into the public consciousness compared to the movies is tiny. And most people only really remember the first two films.

Yet Alien basically codified the 'mundane future' at least as much as Star Wars in visual Scifi, and the design language and attitude of the Colonial Marines/Space Vietnam has served as a blueprint for (at least a certain brand) of scifi soldiers for three decades.

Hell, even the RDA draws from the same well of inspiration.

The Alien itself has also had so many cameos and homages that I've lost count. Everything from inspiring other horror movies to appearing in an episode of the Animaniacs.
 
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