'Avatar' breaks two out of three all-time box-office records

By Sarah Sluis

This week, Avatar became the highest grossing film worldwide, just days after it broke the all-time overseas record. Only the domestic all-time record, held by Titanic, is left to fall. And even this film won't be the end of Avatar mania. Given that Cameron has already mentioned he has mapped out sequels for the movie, it came as little surprise when Slash film revealed that Avatar 2 is in the works, with technical crew members signing three to five-year contracts for the second film.

But what to make of Avatar's success? It has the record, but, to many, it doesn't reach quite the same phenomenon level of Titanic, which prompted magazine covers and excited chatter everywhere I went (perhaps the fact that I was a teen girl when Titanic came out contributes to my perception of the film as huge).

For those trying to contextualize just how big of a deal Avatar is, the all-time domestic box-office grosses, adjusted for inflation, help bring Avatar down from Pandora and back to Earth. On this list, the movie has a higher mountain to climb--it's ranked twenty-seventh. Titanic only made it to number six. Most of the films in the top ten are household names and beloved films among many Americans--Gone With the Wind, Star Wars, The Sound of Music, E.T., Jaws, and The Exorcist.

Part of the reason Avatar was able to break so many records so quickly was due to the added income of 3D and IMAX tickets. With enough people paying a 20-30% premium on tickets, the movie was able rack up more money with fewer ticket sales. It also means that at this point, fewer people have seen the movie than many other record-breakers on the list. That stands to change when Avatar receives another boost at the Oscars. With ten films up for Best Picture, it will be a shock if Avatar's not among them.

Having seen, and loved, Avatar in 3D, I'm still a little turned off when I see the images on a television screen or a still online. The look just doesn't seem right to me. Avatar is a uniquely theatrical movie at a time when fewer and fewer people are actually seeing a movie in theatres. It's just a matter of time before 3D-capable television screens help bridge the gap between theatrical and home entertainment, but in the meantime Avatar brings us back to a time when seeing movies on a big screen with few distractions was a special, impossible-to-replicate experience.