Lies, Damn Lies, and Avatar Box Office “Records”
February 9th, 2010Via: Los Angeles Times:
Everyone in the world in the past couple of days has been writing about how “Avatar” has now surpassed “Titanic” to become the highest-grossing film of all time. But most of the stories have left out the tricky part: You can only make the claim for “Avatar” being the all-time box office champ if you leave out a few prickly little particulars, like the ones my colleague Claudia Eller mentioned in a recent post: namely ticket price inflation, foreign currency fluctuations and surcharges on 3-D movie screens.
So when is a box-office record really a record? And should “Avatar,” like so many modern-day movies that have benefited from the steep rise in ticket prices, especially in the new 3-D era, carry an asterisk next to their name? After all, if we were writing about the all-time box-office champ in terms of actual ticket admissions, it would still be “Gone With the Wind,” David O. Selznick’s 1939 sweeping historical romance that has riveted moviegoers for generations. If you put together an all-time box-office chart, adjusted for inflation, “Gone With the Wind” remains the undefeated, unrivaled champion, having earned an astounding $1.45 billion in ticket sales over the years. As box-office guru, Hollywood.com’s Paul Dergarabedian, told me yesterday: “You never want to say never, but that’s a record that I don’t think will ever be broken.”
In an adjusted for inflation all-time box-office Top 10 (compiled by Dergarabedian), “Gone With the Wind” is the easy winner, with George Lucas’ 1977 “Star Wars” in the No. 2 slot, with $1.26 billion in grosses, followed by 1965’s “Sound of Music,” 1982’s “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and 1956’s “The Ten Commandments.”
Jim Cameron’s “Titanic” comes in at No. 6 on the chart (with $955 million) while “Avatar” doesn’t even come close to making the Top 10, with a mere $558 million in grosses. To give you an idea how different the adjusted gross box-office chart is from the all-time box-office chart we normally follow, “Gone With the Wind” doesn’t even make the Top 50 all-time box-office leaders chart–the one that now has “Avatar” on top.
“Avatar” is not just a nice story about tribes and nature. There is a “natural organization” people form – whenever they are free. You can see it appearing everywhere, where the machine is weak, or even inside the machine – incipient tribes. This comment is “informative”, not exactly related to the subject 🙂
“Observing a prisoner exchange between the Iroquois and the French in upper New York in 1699, Cadwallader Colden is blunt: “ notwithstanding the French Commissioners took all the Pains possible to carry Home the French, that were Prisoners with the Five Nations, and they had full Liberty from the Indians, few of them could be persuaded to return. “Nor, he has to admit, is this merely a reflection on the quality of French colonial life, “for the English had as much Difficulty” in persuading their redeemed to come home, despite what Colden would claim were the obvious superiority of English ways:
No Arguments, no Intreaties, nor Tears of their Friends and Relations, could persuade many of them to leave their new Indian Friends and Acquaintance; several of them that were by the Caressings of their Relations persuaded to come Home, in a little Time grew tired of our Manner of living, and run away again to the Indians, and ended their Days with them. On the other Hand, Indian Children have been carefully educated among the English, cloathed and taught, yet, I think, there is not one Instance, that any of these, after they had Liberty to go among their own People, and were come to Age, would remain with the English, but returned to their own Nations, and became as fond of the Indian Manner of Life as those that knew nothing of a civilized Manner of Living. And, he concludes, what he says of this particular prisoner exchange “has been found true on many other Occasions.”
Benjamin Franklin was even more pointed: When an Indian child is raised in white civilization, he remarks, the civilizing somehow does not stick, and at the first opportunity he will go back to his red relations, from whence there is no hope whatever of redeeming him. But when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and have lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness toprevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the firstgood Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”
Frederick Turner – “Beyond Geography”. Also I recommend “Columbus and other Cannibals” by Jack Forbes. I am not for “returning to nature” – it’s impossible we are too many. It’s just about a natural organization – free, the same way we can’t engineer life, we can’t “design” a system for people. It already exist. It appears when they are free. What to do to obtain that freedom today ? And for all, else we get nowhere. That’s another thing.
I am not for “returning to nature.” I am for “going forward into nature.” Imagine the world we could shape, free of superstition, enhanced by just the right tweaks of clean technology, governed by a consensus of personal virtues. Yes, I am a utopian. But I am also a realist. When the inevitable happens and we all go forward into nature, there will only be a few of us and nature will be a permanent desert. Think Utes recently living in Utah or Shoshone recently living near Death Valley or the many hard-scrabble Mexican, Asian, African, Middle Eastern desert tribes; except think humans mutated by pollution, radiation, and devolved with reduced eyesight, hearing, etc., scratching around for roots, bugs, etc. See “Slow Death” comics from a few decades ago. But also watch “Miracle Planet.” There will be many more death and rebirth cycles on earth before the sun explodes; unfortunately humans won’t be a part of any of those future cycles, unless by some statistical freak something like a human evolves again. I haven’t seen Avatar, but I imagine it leaves the viewer with hope: this is a typical fantasy sop to a culture that long ago lost the cultural will and moral fiber to actually bring the values of a natural utopia into being. A real culture would be enacting the world portrayed in Avatar; our culture relegates it to a wishful thinking exercise, soon returning to the pampering, vicarious Super Bowl and American Idol to distract us from our lack of mettle. As far as earning statistics go, isn’t that just the metric that matters to a culture like ours? Glad to see “Sound of Music” on that list, anyway. Sentimental claptrap, sure, but at least it’s about real people who actually do something healthy and courageous to improve their circumstances.