What’s with the morning-after revenue reporting at boxofficemojo.com? It’s nearly 1 pm in Manhattan and Avatar‘s Wednesday numbers still aren’t up? It made another $16 million on Tuesday, hitting $109 million total. Jett and I attended last night’s 6 pm show at the AMC Lincoln Square — we wanted to catch the monster-screen “real” IMAX 3D version — and it was packed solid. The lines inside the plex were ridiculous. So where are the Wednesday numbers? I’m guessing…what, another $15 or $16 million?

We sat in the third row, and the film looked much better than the “fake” IMAX version at the AMC 34th Street. Avatar‘s success isn’t just about the visuals and the spectacle. It’s the emotion, stupid. This is something that your emotionally side-steppy critics will never understand in a deep-down way. It’s the primal-ness, the movie-movieness of the thing. It’s all myth and metaphor and fable, and the audience (okay, the partly-Eloi audience) gets this, of course. For once they’re on the money. Nobody’s looking for Tom Stoppard/Alvin Sargent/Bo Goldman-level dialogue. They’re going with the all of it.