comment #1

Mark says ...

Cameron overcompensated for the "King of the World" remark with all his patronizing modesty. Sounds like he thinks that the original criticism stemmed from apparent arrogance to proclaim himself as such, but really, he just delivered the line in an awkward and nerdy way. Deep down, he's really just a big nerd; a gifted nerd with great vision.

He's the most powerful guy in town, capable of getting complete autonomy on a $500B budget if not double. I'd much rather he be arrogant about it, than to encourage people beneath him to give themselves a hand.

comment #2

Phreaker says ...

He's just a weird, obtuse person. By all accounts, a complete asshole. But yes, a visionary, gifted as hell. He was trying to be humble but it came off as insincere.

comment #3

lazespud says ...

"he just delivered the line in an awkward and nerdy way"

I agree; it's weird that he was clearly just restating a quote from Titanic, but that fact seemed lost on so many people. It was just an excited guy quoting from his movie.

That said, I think that a 500 million (you said "B" but you probably meant "M") production budget seems crazy, let alone double. My reason is that what in the world would ADD to the cost of another Avatar like film? The whole think was done on green screen and computers? The only real cost I could see other than general inflation would be if he went out and secured A list stars. Which is something he's rarely done. So what would he have done differently on, say, Avatar, had his budget been doubled? I'll be nothing because it cost exactly as much as it needed by.

By the way, I took Box Office Mojo's "Adjusted for Inflation" North American grosses of the top films and adjusted them again for population growth... you want to know where Avatar will end up being assuming it clears 600M domestic? Number 47. Right behind Home Alone. To be as popular as Gone with the Wind it would need to have everyone in the US who saw Avatar go back to the theater and see it again. Six more times. Remember the 1945 weepy The Bells of St. Mary's with Bing Crosby? It was TWICE as popular as Avatar.

So let's have a little perspective here....

comment #4

lazespud says ...

Jesus christ , my keyboard is failing me. Sorry for all the misspellings and mistypings on the previous post.

comment #5

Rich S. says ...

As I recall, the awkwardness of the "King of the World" quote stemmed from Cameron's seeming insensitivity of using the line immediately after having asked the Oscar audience for a moment of silence for the Titanic victims.

The man is clearly the best at what he does, which is to produce envelope-pushing crowd-pleasing epics. If Hollywood has a job #1, that's it. Nothing to apologize for or be humble about.

comment #6

allstar397 says ...

Hey lazespud, can you point me to the chart on there that accounts for the general drop in moviegoing and the increase in entertainment options as well as effects of the home video market and the internet/file sharing on movie attendance?

comment #7

Gordon27 says ...

"the awkwardness of the "King of the World" quote stemmed from Cameron's seeming insensitivity of using the line immediately after having asked the Oscar audience for a moment of silence for the Titanic victims."

I don't think that's true; the King of the World was when he was the director, and the moment of silence was when he won Best Picture.

That Cameron book Jeff was pimping a month or two back, 'The Futurist', that claims that, when Cameron walked backstage after winning Best Director, Warren Beatty took him aside and said "What the fuck were you thinking?!" regarding the quote.

comment #8

Jonathan Spuij says ...

What was he thinking?

"I AM the king of the world"

comment #9

Rich S. says ...

Gordon27, you are correct. The insensitive comment after the moment of silence was "Let's go party 'till dawn."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-dPoCfk2n8&feature=channel

The "King of the World" comment came earlier in the evening.

comment #10

Anti-Spam says ...

king of the world well we have all see these before

comment #11

Anti-Spam says ...

we could all do to have a conference call about this king of the world

comment #12

Mark says ...

$500 B? Ha! Sorry. Of course I meant M. As far as where the money would go should Cameron command that such a budget, it would likely go toward developing whatever next innovation he sees fit. At the very least, you'd think they try to mimic the 3D experience sans glasses. (Theaters can still charge extra though.) But I'm sure there's some sort of other optical immersion technology that i don't even know about, just waiting for an investment of a couple hundred million

comment #13

BurmaShave says ...

Wells, if it makes you feel better, apparently Cameron's technology is going to be utilized to recreate every person that died this year for the In Memoriam, and every fat person among them will be shown eating from a tub of ice cream by hand before collapsing.

comment #14

davie says ...

Isn't there about 80 people who vote on the Golden Globes? Cameron is a major tool and I hate Avatar with a passion. Is there anyone other than me who thinks Nine was great?

comment #15

markj says ...

@davie: No.

comment #16

joncro says ...

I'm confused. It makes no sense to send in Avatars without them pretending to be actual Navi. If the Navi know that the Avatars are human then they might as well just send in people. Am I wrong?

comment #17

azmoviegoer says ...

It's a good thing that he lives on oceanfront property because he is going to need a space with the vastness of the Pacific to house his ego once Avatar is crowned Best Picture. NO ONE is going to be able to challenge this man's creative vision and that is not necessarily a good thing. He's going to be an older, taller version of Napolean from here on out.

comment #18

reverent and free says ...

Joncro, the film begins after the first encounters and after blood has been shed on both sides, hence why they both know each other's languages. I got the impression that Avatar bodies are simply better for the Pandora terrain.

comment #19

Gordon27 says ...

"If the Navi know that the Avatars are human then they might as well just send in people. Am I wrong?"

Human bodies would die, and those crazy big suits wouldn't be able to navigate the forests of Pandora.

comment #20

tagliere says ...

From Variety:
Cameron called his directing kudo "bittersweet." "I would have been ecstatic if Kathryn (Bigelow) had won as best director," he said. "Because we need a female director to win and she deserves the recognition."

Keep campaigning for the opposition! (and keep giving ill-received speeches).

comment #21

lazespud says ...

To allstar or whomever wants to see my breakdown of the relative numbers showing the popularity of Avatar versus other movies historically, but accounting for population growth and inflation, send me an e-mail at richard@richardhuffman.com and I'll send you the excel spreadsheet. It's really stunningly illuminating to realize that Avatar really is just an also ran in terms of relative popularity. Assuming it goes to 600 million dollars, basically it will be the 47th most popular film out of the last 70 years.

comment #22

Mark says ...

"Assuming it goes to 600 million dollars, basically it will be the 47th most popular film out of the last 70 years."

Lazespud. You're completely ignoring international numbers. Two-thirds of its money is coming from overseas. Even adjusted for inflation, Avatar is already way ahead of stuff like Home Alone, which made closer to 2/3 of its money domestically. Avatar is no way an also ran.

comment #23

Fortunesfool says ...

"Made it Ma, Top of the world!"

I said that once, after climbing a flight of stairs. I was of course quoting Cagney and having fun. I was not suggesting that i'd made it to the 'top of the world'. In the same way that Cameron wasn't suggesting he was 'King of the World'. He was just quoting the scene from the movie where jack says the line to exclaim his sense of elation at that moment.

You Americans take everything at face value, that's why you all suck at irony. Cameron is Canadian and has an offbeat sense of humour - Most of what he says is tongue in cheek but everyone takes him seriously.

I agree that Bigelow should have won though.

comment #24

lazespud says ...

"Lazespud. You're completely ignoring international numbers. Two-thirds of its money is coming from overseas. Even adjusted for inflation, Avatar is already way ahead of stuff like Home Alone, which made closer to 2/3 of its money domestically. Avatar is no way an also ran."

I actually didn't ignore the international numbers; box office mojo only has international numbers back about a decade. So there was no way to make an apples to apples comparison which is why I concentrated on domestic grosses.

But let's throw that out and just compare anyway: Let's say Avatar tops out at 2 billion dollars globally. Now let's compare that to the DOMESTIC numbers of Gone With the Wind, adjusted for population growth and inflation. Gone with the Wind earns $3,43,452,821. Or almost twice as much among American filmgoers alone as Avatar does among world filmgoers.

But again, I didn't have international data for almost all of the top films on the list. I did this analysis for a spec article about avatar's numbers and I was super careful to just point out that I was talking about the "most popular movie among american film-goers"... but that might not have been clear in my post above. It's really quite amazing the list of movies that would qualify, by my analysis, as more popular than Avatar here in the states. Among them: Bambi, the Graduate, the Sting, Mary Poppins, Ben Hur, Doctor Zhivago, The Bells of St. Marys, the Sound of Music, American Grafitti, Blazing Saddles, Love Story, and about 30 more.

The BIG thing that my analysis obviously doesn't account for is home viewing through DVD, Blue Ray, etc. Who's to say that if you could account for the number of people who also watch the movie in their homes that Avatar wouldn't blow GWTW away?

comment #25

Gordon27 says ...

"Most of what he says is tongue in cheek but everyone takes him seriously."

To be fair, you'd think he would've learned this after being sued by Harlan Ellison specifically because of some tongue-in-cheek comments he made in an interview.

comment #26

markj says ...

From The Futurist, page 55: "Harlan Ellison is a parasite who can kiss my ass."

comment #27

Howlingman says ...

As I said before, the story isn't Avatar's gross, adjusted for inflation or otherwise. It's that a film released only a month ago - a film that many self-proclaimed "experts" were predicting would flop and flop big - ended up surpassing expectations and left these so called experts sputtering in the wind.

comment #28

Gordon27 says ...

also, the first film since 'The Sixth Sense' to be #1 five weekends in a row [and what's going to be the movie to finally knock it out?].

comment #29

Gordon27 says ...

mark - that book is self-serving, with several glaring omissions! (It's a fun read overall, but the summary of the Ellison incident is ridiculously one sided.)

comment #30

allstar397 says ...

Lazespud, i dont doubt your numbers. My point is there are a lot of unquantifiable effects that point in the opposite direction as inflation. The home video market for one, which has greatly shortened theater runs, and decreased repeat theater viewing. Not to mention a general decrease in moviegoing, increase in competition (a whole lot more films out now, and a lot more alternative entertainment options vying for consumer $$$'s) We'd also be very naive to assume internet piracy has zero effect on movie grosses. (even in the case of a film like avatar that begs to be seen in a 3D theater)

I'm not saying inflation #'s are useless, but need to be taken with a HUGE grain of salt, especially when referring to much older films (IE: gone with the wind, etc.)

comment #31

Gordon27 says ...

not to mention the multiple revolutions in film marketing that have taken place since 'Gone With the Wind', which was released at a time when distributors were also exhibitors, and record-keeping was a lot less precise.

comment #32

lazespud says ...

Allstar -- I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that you and I are actually in agreement on basically all of this. In the time of GWTW, people went to the movies like 50 to 70 times a year on average, and now it's maybe 8 times a year. But the average person today clearly watches WAY more movies... just through different means. I mean my friend and I would leave lebowski running in our office during the day and we ended up seeing that thing maybe 150 times all told.

My original point was simply that when people point out box office performance as their indicator of popularity in America, the Avatar simply falls well short of dozens of movies... for very understandable reasons.

It's a lot like how we talk about the "giant success" of American Idol, because it get 20 million viewers a week. There was a time 30 years ago when 20 million viewers would mean certain cancellation. Now it is the standard for "monster hit.". Does that mean American Idol isn't successful? Of course not. But it helps to put things in perspective... which is what I was trying to do with Avatar.

(A movie that I loved, BTW).

comment #33

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