Posted on 01/03/2010 3:26:36 PM PST by notes2005
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – "Avatar" sped past the $1 billion mark at the worldwide box office after three weekends in release, making it the fourth-biggest movie of all time, according to data released on Sunday.
James Cameron's 3-D sci-fi epic earned $1.02 billion, powered by sales of $202 million during the New Year holiday weekend, distributor 20th Century Fox said.
The only movies ahead of it are Cameron's "Titanic" ($1.8 billion), "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" ($1.12 billion), and "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" ($1.07 billion).
North American moviegoers chipped in $68.3 million, setting a record for a film in its third weekend. The old mark of $45 million was set by "Spider-Man" in 2002.
After 17 days in cinemas across the United States and Canada, "Avatar" has earned $352.1 million, placing it at No. 15 among all movies in terms of ticket sales.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
This is depressing. Communist drek and propaganda dressed up in dazzling technicals.
Capitalism, A Love Story.
Bookmark for later.
You have to be some strange breed of disgusting cretin to root for a global corporation that hires mercenaries to murder thousands of women and children (even if they are blue). The hero is a (former) Marine who does the right thing.
Yes, there was leftwing propaganda dispersed, but I enjoyed the movie thoroughly.
He could create a roller coaster ride based on its soaring heights and twists and turns.
This is bullcrap. Adjust the dollars back to the movies they are being compared to. It’s 7-8 bucks to see a movie now. Star Wars in 1977 dollars probably kicks this movies’ ass.
The main character, Jake Sully, is in a wheel chair because the government cannot afford to regrow a wounded soldier’s spine, though the rich can have it done.
The “security chief” is pretty much an evil military guy clone, even looks like GI Joe with a mean snarl.
They don’t bash Bush specifically. They bash evil corporations, greedy businesses, worship of money.
It didn’t look visually stunning to me from the commercials. The characters’ faces looked awful.
I’m ashamed at the number of freepers who supported this dreck. Won’t make the tiniest sacrifice to fight liberalism. Depressing.
Also, and I know this is unbelievable....have family visiting parents in Ohio...they were at the Children's museum in Dayton and a man offered them a Chipmunk video for three dollars...it had a large A for Alvin written on the outside. My bro bought it, thinking the guy could use the change (he had a friend holding a stack of CD's with him that they were selling}.
Well...it turns out it was a bootleg copy of AVATAR, which he quickly turned off so kids would not see it. We watched it late that night...my gosh....SURREAL!!! (And kinda fun!)
I saw it today. If it is anti-military it is also anti-technology and anti-atheist. It is not against violence—the film is full of violence.
Stunning movie—I think I would like to see it again just to digest all of the effects—they don’t look like special effects.
B F D
But when you’re just comparing dollars none of that really matters. Because the games cost 5 times as much it’s not that hard for them to make twice as much money. And you just compared the domestic grosses for Avatar ($352 million), world wide (where the 6 billion population is) it’s pulled in a full billion bucks.
I’m not saying MW2’s sales aren’t impressive. I’m saying that using them to dismiss Avatar’s revenues is silly. It’s like comparing car sales revenues to bicycle sales revenues, the core math is a simply unfair comparison. Any successful video game WILL earn more money than a similarly successful movie. Again look at how the numbers translate, Avatar’s domestic revenue equates to nearly 50 million sold tickets, MW2 revenue equates to around 11 million sold games. Both very successful within their industry, and it’s not really a hit on Avatar that its sales equate to so many fewer dollars than MW2.
Still, the character is nothing like the Holmes of the books. I don’t think I could go see the movie. It just wouldn’t be the same.
Yes, I am an old stick-in-the-mud and proud of it! ;-)
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Outer-Space Cartoon Says Americans Are the Bad Guys:
"Millions for defense, not a sixpence for tribute," Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, once a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, said in 1796. "Millions for special effects, not a Starbucks gift card for writing," might be the motto of modern Hollywood, at least if "Avatar" is the exemplar. "Avatar" should have been marketed as a cartoon and best animated feature of 2009. The special effects were great -- though yours truly increasingly finds computer-drawn special effects boring, since they are so obviously fake. The script was as dull and predictable as the special effects were flashy. Maybe the dialogue sounded better in Na'vi.
Hardly anything was explained -- so let's start with why the whole plot was set in motion in the first place. Sinister humans are bent on removing peace-loving blue aliens from a point on Pandora above some minerals the sinister humans want to strip-mine; the peace-loving natives won't move because the place is sacred ground. Reader Bryan Law of Independence, Ohio, notes: "Even today, horizontal drilling means you don't have to destroy the surface above a resource to obtain it. So why wasn't the problem on Pandora solved by horizontal drilling? Don't tell me that 150 years from now, humanity has become capable of interstellar travel, yet forgotten a basic mining technique."
The mineral is an anti-gravity substance that floats. Midway through the movie, we learn there are entire mountains of it floating above Pandora. So why not mine the floating mountains, where no Pandorans live, rather than go to war with the natives? The clichéd super-heartless corporation that wants the mineral is depicted as obsessed by profit. War is a lot more expensive than mining! If profit is what motivates the corporation, war is the last thing it would want.
Because hardly anything in the movie is explained, we never find out what nation or organization has built a huge base on Pandora, then brought along an armada of combat aircraft. The Earth characters all look, act and talk like Americans -- in fact, slang hasn't changed in 150 years! But does this project have some kind of government approval, or is it an interplanetary criminal enterprise? It's hard to believe that 150 years from now, humanity's first interaction with another sentient species would be conducted without any public officials present, but that's what is depicted.
And who are the gun-toting fatigue-clad personnel commanded by the ultra-evil Colonel Quaritch -- are they regular military, mercenaries, private security contractors? Audiences never find out. They're just a bunch of trigger-happy killers who want to slaughter intelligent beings, and all of them but one do exactly what Colonel Quaritch says, even once it's clear Quaritch is insane. The colonel must work for somebody -- for the Pentagon, some government agency, for the corporation. So why isn't he subject to supervision? No organization would entrust a project costing trillions of dollars -- a town-sized facility has been built five light-years away -- to a single individual with unchecked power. You'd worry that the single individual would commit some huge blunder that wiped out your trillion-dollar investment, which ends up being exactly what happens. I found the colonel with absolute authority a lot more unrealistic than the floating mountains.
Then there's director James Cameron's view of military personnel. If I were a military man or woman, I would find "Avatar" insulting. With one exception, the helicopter pilot played by Michelle Rodriguez -- her character is twice referred to as a Marine, suggesting the military personnel are regular military, not mercenaries -- all the people in fatigues are brainless sadists. They want to kill, kill, kill the innocent. They can't wait to begin the next atrocity. It's true that the U.S. military has conducted atrocities, in Vietnam and during the Plains Indians wars. But slaughter of the innocent is rare in U.S. military annals. In "Avatar," it's the norm. The bloodthirsty military personnel readily comply with the colonel's orders to gun down natives. No one questions him -- though in martial law, a soldier not only may but must refuse an illegal order. Plus the military personnel are depicted as such utter morons -- not a brain in any of their heads -- that none notice the TOTALLY OBVIOUS detail that Pandora's unusual biology will be worth more than its minerals. Yes, movies traffic in absurd super-simplifications. But we're supposed to accept that of the deployment of several hundred, every soldier save one is a low-IQ cold-blooded murderer. A mysterious organization spends a trillion dollars to build a base in another star system -- then puts an obvious lunatic in complete command.
What does "Avatar" build up to? Watching the invading soldiers -- most of whom happen to be former American military personnel -- die is the big cathartic ending of the flick. Extended sequences show Americans being graphically slaughtered in the natives' counterattack. The deaths of aliens are depicted as heartbreaking tragedies, while the deaths of American security forces are depicted as a whooping good time. In Cameron's "Aliens," "The Abyss" and his television show "Dark Angel," U.S. military personnel are either the bad guys or complete idiots, often shown graphically slaughtered. Cameron is hardly the only commercial-film director to present watching evil U.S. soldiers slaughtered as popcorn-chomping suburban shopping mall fun: in the second "X-Men" flick, U.S. soldiers are the bad guys and graphically killed off. Films that criticize the military for its faults are one thing: When did watching depictions of U.S. soldiers dying become a form of fun?
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