Culture News Despite the controversies, Avatar 2 competes with Top Gun Maverick and Jurassic World Dominion
Published on 28/12/2022 at 16:36
It’s been two weeks since Avatar: The Way of the Water hit theaters. A highly anticipated film, which arrives 13 years after the first opus. However, ambitions have not been lowered. Evidenced by the box office goals and the mass of people who have already gone to see James Cameron’s feature film.
Avatar 2: historical objectives
Two days ago, on the occasion of an article recalling the new chronology of the media in France, we indicated to you that Avatar: The Way of the Water had surpassed $850 million at the box office. The film is therefore a huge success, but according to the producers, the film is still in delay on forecast. These forecasts are of paramount importance.
Indeed, James Cameron indicated that, to be profitable, Avatar: The Way of the Water must exceed Titanic, and accumulate more than two billion dollars in revenue. Only 5 films have managed to pass the two billion mark: Avatar, Avengers: Endgame, Titanic, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, and Avengers: Infinity War.
The objectives are therefore absolutely crazy, but correspond to the expenses, and to the needs to feed the franchise. Avatar 2 would have cost, for its entire production, at least $400 million according to Hollywood Reporter sources. We therefore better understand the worries of James Cameron, who indicated in an interview that he did not know if the public would respond, and who wondered if it wasn’t too late, 13 years later. These 850 million dollars generated in 10 days testify to the strong interest of the public, but we are still quite far from the objective.
Despite the controversies, the billion!
The latter is now a little closer since According to Discussing Films, Avatar: The Waterway just passed the billion mark at the box office, with 1.006 billion dollars generated. The latest updated figures evoke 900 million dollars, but this information of the billion should be confirmed very quickly. In doing so, Avatar: The Way of Water enters the 50th place of the biggest hits cinema excluding inflation. But above all, with 1.006 billion, it is at the second highest grossing movies of 2022.
It indeed exceeds Jurassic World: The World After (1.003 billion), but still stay behind Top Gun: Maverick which currently displays 1.49 billion dollars. Whatever, the call for a boycott launched in the United States by an Amerindian association does not seem to have been widely followed. Yuè Begay, co-president of the association, indicated that according to her, Avatar 2 was “horrible and racist” because it resumed the myth of the saviorembodied by a providential white man, and withdrew their culture from the natives:
Our cultures have been taken away from us in an evil way to satisfy the complex of the saviour, of the providential man. Stop blueface. The Lakota people are powerful.
Same story on the side of Mana Tyne, a Maori from Queensland, Australiawho believes that the Maori tattoos in the film are just meaningless abstract shapes:
I would love to see more Maori people and culture represented on screen in cinema, but I want to see Maori playing them. I don’t want to have to sacrifice the importance of our practices which have already lost so much because of colonialism.
James Cameron had already indicated that Avatar talked about colonialism in North and South America. For the second film, he wanted do better by getting closer of marginalized peoples and groups:
People who have been historically victimized are always right. It is not for me, speaking from the point of view of white privilege, to tell them that they are wrong.
About Avatar: The Waterway
