Every year I complain about those godawful cookie-cutter scenes in which the hero of a film jumps head-first off an incredibly high building or cliff. The same exact bit has turned up in many if not most of Hollywood’s high-budget action-fantasy-thrillers over the last 20-odd years. As far as I can recall the big-jump syndrome began with Tim Burton‘s Batman. This is a YouTube clip reel, of course.

In any case I just noticed that an “oooh, wow” cliff jump is also in Avatar, and something inside me collapsed when this hit me. My intestines dislodged and did a big splat. Why, I’m wondering, don’t the makers of these event films ever say to themselves, “Jeez, here we are doing another building-jump or cliff-jump scene. This must be the 64th or 65th since Batman…I forget. Some kind in my office has shown me a list. Shouldn’t we try something else? Audiences are going to get sick of this eventually.”