It didn't take long for the answers to follow. As moviegoers around the world have found, Avatar is some achievement. It's perhaps not vintage Cameron - you'd had to dig back to the 80s for that - and it might have more Titanic parallels than some may be comfortable with, but it's the kind of huge, surprising blockbuster that they weren't supposed to be making any more.
What's even more impressive is that it's not part of a franchise, nor based on any licensed property. Instead, it's that rarest of things: a huge budget gamble (taking up to half a billion dollars to bring to the screen, depending on which report you believe), with pretty much no safety net underneath.
The critical reaction has been strong. Early reviews were utterly ecstatic, and even the more tempered reactions have been positive. The general consensus ranges from three to five stars (more weighted towards the latter), with aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes scoring the film at a very high 83% rating. Time will tell, of course, whether opinion stays so high once the hype has died down, and once the film gets contained onto DVD and Blu-ray. But we have a sneaking suspicion that it might.
For Fox, though, it's not the critical response that's giving it a sigh of relief. It's the box office numbers. James Cameron's previous film was a box office phenomenon. His latest? The numbers speak for themselves. Worldwide, in under 20 days, it's racked up $1,018bn. It's become the fourth biggest film of all time in three weeks.
Three weeks.
That's staggering, by anyone's standards. What's more, of the other nine films in the top ten of all time, eight of them are franchises. It's only Avatar and Titanic that aren't. And Avatar doesn't have DiCaprio-mania on its side either. It's an absolute one off, once more with James Cameron at the helm.
What's helping Avatar's numbers is that it's clearly got legs (and tails). It took in nearly $70m in the weekend just gone in the States, and two thirds of its business is still coming in from overseas. It's simply pouring in money from all quarters of the globe, at a pretty much unprecedented rate for a blockbuster movie, and the signs are that it could do for weeks and weeks to come (it took Titanic several months to make its money, ultimately).
A conservative estimate now would suggest its final worldwide gross will hit $1.3-1.4bn, but we'd be loathed to put a number on it. Avatar, if Oscar season doesn't hurt it (and there's not too much direct competition coming) could yet give Titanic a real box office run for its money.
The big winner in all of this, of course, is Cameron himself. Having once again proved his naysayers wrong in dramatic fashion for the second time in succession, Hollywood is not going to be shy in handing him cheques of any amount.
Right now, he's the only film maker on the planet who can deliver massive, massive blockbusters of this scale and return, and whichever of his projects he chooses to tackle next - Avatar 2, perhaps? - he's hardly going to have to go rattling the tin to get the funding. King of the world? Right now, he might just be.
So does the Avatar success leave the Internet with egg on its face? In certain quarters, you'd have to conclude that it does. We wrote ourselves how Fox's marketing campaign seemed all over the shop, but you can't argue with the end result. Whatever your thoughts on the trailers, the clips and such like, they've done their job.
And even at its lowest points, Avatar was a film that was regularly being talked about. We retain a worry that the blanket marketing approach be used as a template for every film, but there's little denying that it's been mightily effective in Avatar's case.
And ultimately, whether you like the film or not, it's giving cinema a huge shot in the arm. Not for the 3D or anything like that (the jury is still out there, arguably). No, it's shown to studios that you don't need a comic book, or a sequel, or a major movie star, to given them an event picture. You need the most crucial thing of all: a film maker behind the camera who knows what they're doing.
Mr Cameron, love him or loathe him, has once again shown that he absolutely fits the bill.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012