Six months ago Avatar was all set to fail big time? Yet now James Cameron sits atop another huge commercial and critical hit. So just what happened?
It's not, to be fair, the first time that James Cameron has triumphed against the odds. It's been an oft-told story over the past month that he stared into the eyes of disaster before, throughout the notorious production of Titanic back in the mid-to-late 90s.
Back then, everyone knew better than Cameron: the film was going to bomb, it was going to lose lots of money, and his career was going to come tumbling to an end. Terminator and True Lies sequels were to be the best he could hope for afterwards.
And Titanic, let's remember, was made before the influence of the Internet came to pass. Can you just imagine the tittle-tattle that would be around now, had Titanic been made under the scrutinising gaze of the online world?
The press the movie was receiving prior to its release was savage enough as it stood. Had online swords been allowed anywhere near it, it would have been beaten harder than a piñata at a particularly sugar-fuelled kids birthday party.
Hindsight has, I'd argue, tempered the critical reaction to Titanic somewhat (it has moments of utter brilliance, but the love story is still sappy and hardly Cameron's strength), but it's hard to contest the numbers. The film stands as the most successful (not adjusted for inflation) movie of all time, a position it's held for over a decade now. Furthermore, its $US1.8bn worldwide box office takings haven't been challenged in the remotest since. The closest any other film has come has been the $US1.119bn that Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King brought in. Only Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and The Dark Knight have grossed the billion mark at all.
Then Avatar came along.
However you look at it, Fox's marketing campaign for Avatar came across as erratic. For most of 2009, nothing was seen of the film at all, unusual for what was slated as one of the biggest releases of the year. This, of course, led to the build up to what we can fairly call that trailer.
We're talking about the original, underwhelming promo for Avatar that impressed some, but left many wondering whether James Cameron was, once more, staring disaster in the face. It wasn't a bad trailer, in hindsight. But neither was it the kind that shook you by the shoulders and demanded that you go to see the film.
And given the reports of the price tag for Avatar, that's the kind of trailer that many were expecting to see. What we knew about the film, up until that point, was more about the technological side of things, with 3D taking centre stage.
What we knew about the film after that trailer wasn't a great deal more than that. And while it may seem a little unfair that so much was heaped on the shoulders of just over two minutes of footage, it did lead to suspicions that Avatar might be all style, no substance.
Fox, however, reacted, and from where we were sitting, it seemed to go overboard in the other direction. Perhaps the days are gone when a major blockbuster can hit cinema screens without at least 10-20 minutes of footage being released in advance, but there was a period of a month of two in the build up to Avatar's release when it seemed that pretty much every day there was a new clip, new featurette or piece of promotional material.
That's on top of the unprecedented screening of nearly 20 minutes of the film at the end of the summer, which drew thousands upon thousands of people around the world into cinemas just to see some material from a film still months away from release.
Even then, however, while interest in Avatar was clearly high, the consensus didn't seem to be that the film itself was looking particularly staggering. Ferngully? Dances With Wolves? The parallels were being thrown in its direction (with some grains of truth to them, as it turned out). And when the first press screenings of the film began, there was a genuine feeling that people had no idea how strong a film they were going to get. It felt like it could go either way. Just what kind of film was Avatar going to be?
Issue: 133 | February, 2012