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What I know is exactly why you didn't answer.
I don't take obvious bait, sorry ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Honestly cultural impact feels very much a "know it when you see it" sort of thing except you totally aren't seeing it.
Avatar is a very awkward film thematically. It strives towards anti-colonialism, but it has the main character appropriate a native body, sleep with a native princess, and rise to lead the native population in place of the native leadership. It's Mighty Whitey played entirely straight. However, the film ends with Jake fully rejecting "humanity" (or western whiteness, or both, depending on how you read the film) by becoming a full-time Na'vi while almost every other human is booted from the planet. That's a pretty absolute anti-colonial conclusion for a piece of mainstream speculative fiction and doesn't lend itself well to developing a large fandom in the West.
Eh, Dune has a lot more awareness about the tropes that it's using, and basically the few books after the first are spent brutally deconstructing the idea of the 'white messiah'. Not to mention that the Fremen feel like they have a lot more agency and just stuff going on in general than the Na'vi do, even despite the amount of screentime they have in comparison.Which is funny because Lawrence of Arabia : In Space, has been an evergreen title in science fiction.
I guess because Dune doesn't explicitly make the HFY boners go flacid.
Though either way, I think this is a criticism that mostly only matters to people who spend a lot of time in very specific internet spaces.
No need to worry about that, I'm a lifelong atheist. But I am curious, and it may be illuminating: do you think that the MCU has cultural impact?
My big knock against Avatar as "culturally influential" is that its themes and ideas didn't penetrate media more broadly. There weren't Avatar imitators, and increased attention to native and ecological issues today arose from political activism that post-dated Avatar and in no way associated itself with the movie. Avatar's CGI was impressive, but its specific style and visual language had few imitators. There is no persistent Avatar fandom that outlasted the film itself.
Avatar is a very awkward film thematically. It strives towards anti-colonialism, but it has the main character appropriate a native body, sleep with a native princess, and rise to lead the native population in place of the native leadership. It's Mighty Whitey played entirely straight. However, the film ends with Jake fully rejecting "humanity" (or western whiteness, or both, depending on how you read the film) by becoming a full-time Na'vi while almost every other human is booted from the planet. That's a pretty absolute anti-colonial conclusion for a piece of mainstream speculative fiction and doesn't lend itself well to developing a large fandom in the West.
Eh, Dune has a lot more awareness about the tropes that it's using, and basically the few books after the first are spent brutally deconstructing the idea of the 'white messiah'. Not to mention that the Fremen feel like they have a lot more agency and just stuff going on in general than the Na'vi do, even despite the amount of screentime they have in comparison.
Debates about Avatar's impact, or lack there of, on pop culture kind've miss the point of what Cameron was aiming for, and also ignore the fact that Avatar was insanely impactful and an absolute game changer in the world of filmmaking. First, yes Avatar is a big genre blockbuster and so we expect it to be franchised to hell and back with an EU (and are thus mystified when no EU appears), the film was never really meant to be a Star Wars-esque franchise starter (though I'm sure the suits hoped it would be).
Instead, Avatar is James Cameron using his blank check status to push digital filmmaking and motion capture technology to their absolute limits. The film is, by design, a pretty familiar story with pretty familiar trappings (environmentalism, Vietnam imagery, colonization of the Americas, etc.) so it doesn't have to waste time bringing you up to speed on the world building bullshit. The focus is on Pandora, not as a setting, but as a set piece - to but it simply, Avatar is a $200 million tech demo. It's Cameron showing what the technology can really do with time and effort, applied to a clear vision.
And Avatar was, like I said, an absolute game changer - modern filmmaking is divided into a pre- and post-Avatar world. Like who gives a shit if you think the story is trite or undercooked, the film pushed filmmaking technology to the absolute bleeding edge. It took motion capture technology, which at the time was essentially just fancy rotoscoping (that pretty much only worked on Andy Serkis) and turned it into a practical tool that's (relatively) simple to use. It took digital filmmaking from the fancy FMV cutscenes of the Star Wars prequels and showed us how you can render shots that are almost indistinguishable from real life, in entirely digital landscapes. When it won the Oscar for Best Cinematography, despite something like 75% of it being "shot" on a computer, you know it's a whole new world. There's no MCU without Avatar, full stop, or at least no MCU that we'd recognize.
You also have to remember that Avatar was intended as a showcase for 3D on top of the insane digital visuals - the film was designed, from the ground up, to make use of 3D to enhance the digital filmmaking to literal new dimension. It's almost certainly part of why it made so much money - the "Holy fuck!" factor was strong. It's just that the industry looked at the box office returns and thought "3D equals $$$$$$$$", not "Hey when someone smart uses it right 3D equals $$$$$$$", not to mention it was also part of Jackson's competing vision of the future filmmaking in HFR. Both 3D and HFR tanked (HFR disastrously so), so a lot of the aforementioned "Holy fuck!" factor doesn't come through at home.
I honestly don't think the film should be seen as an aborted Star Wars, but instead it's best point of comparison is the OG Jurassic Park. That film was a ginormous success, smashing records worldwide and cementing Spielberg's reputation as the king of blockbusters. By combining practical effects with CGI it heralded a new era of filmmaking, and revolutionized the industry in ways we're still dealing with today. It spawned sequels, one of which is one of the highest grossing films ever (outgrossing even the original!) and it also, compared to it's box office success, has made relatively little impact on pop culture. Like aside from maybe "Clever girl", your average person would probably respond with a variation on "Yeah Jurassic Park, cool movie!" and move on when pressed.
There's a handful of comics and a spin off show, but that's about it when it comes to EU. No ones dressing up as Ian Malcom or Alan Grant for Comic Con by the droves, there's no sprawling novel verse that's now bleeding into the mainline series, no multiverse of madness. It's just a few movies that people love and that show off new and creative ways to depict Dinosaurs on screen, and they clean up at the box office pretty much like clockwork. Why aren't we questioning their impact on pop culture?
I didn't say it wasn't memorable, but that it didn't spawn the kind of attendant EU that you'd expect from the highest grossing film of all time. Shit, it didn't even spawn a Saturday morning cartoon, despite coming out a time when they were turning fucking everything into Saturday morning cartoons.
Jurassic Park is a well regarded, highly successful film that doesn't have any kind of range of spin-offs, but no one's walking around saying "What's up with Jurassic Park not having any kind of impact on pop culture?"
Jurassic Park is a well regarded, highly successful film that doesn't have any kind of range of spin-offs, but no one's walking around saying "What's up with Jurassic Park not having any kind of impact on pop culture?"
It literally spawned a generation of universities adding paleontology courses, including universities that had never had them before, and spawned an enormous resurgence in fascination with dinosaurs among the general public as well as a total rethinking in the public zeitgeist of what Dinosaurs were.
Pre JP - Dinosaurs were slow and lethargic giant iguanas.
Post JP - Dinosaurs were agile and diverse animals that filled every niche in the environment.
Multiple stage shows, traveling animatronic exhibits, dozens of cgi animated documentaries . . . I mean, JP itself may not have been plastered on any of it, but I find it hard to say it didn't have an influence.
I mean, Avatar likewise spawned an entirely two new field filmmaking (digital filmmaking and motion capture acting), changing the industry forever, and lead to audiences accepting digital filmmaking as something existing alongside live action, instead of just a fancy cartoon. It also had a few Cirque du Soleil tie-in shows, a few video games, and a whole dang theme park.
The two aren't perfectly identical, but their footprint is roughly similar compared to their box office success.
Unlike Jurassic Park, where there was absolutely no guarantee dinosaurs were suddenly going to become popular.
The problem with claiming it 'spawned a new field of filmmaking' is that it would have happened anyway. Avatar wasn't the first or last digital or motion capture film, it was always progressing with the technology.
Unlike Jurassic Park, where there was absolutely no guarantee dinosaurs were suddenly going to become popular.