There’s been a lot of talk about the box office the past couple of months, and what it means for cinema in general. Now that the 3D digital monkey puppet movie is on a collision course with the most money ever grossed in theatres. Mostly, this falls into a series of pretty trite and predictable camps, and I wanted to take a look at these and try to see through some of what people are saying. This is not an examination of the content of Avatar per se. I’m not that interested in sorting out whether it’s racist, or a copy of another property, or even if it’s good or bad. That’s a separate debate or a series of them. For myself I declare my bias to be that Avatar does not ring as more racist for me than the general culture that produced it; also I think it kicks ass as entertainment and I have enjoyed the hell out of watching it. That’s not what I want to talk about - I just want to examine the threads of dissent over whether or not the amount of money it has made is significant.
Here’s my general take on that, BTW. Avatar represents a pretty serious break from what we think of as filmmaking. The New York Times just this weekend compared its use of 3D technology to The Jazz Singer’s use of sound. This means we should expect that if the comparison holds most if not all films will use 3D within about 5 years. There were silent films made after 1927, but fewer and fewer until to make a silent today would be considered downright strange. I think for a segment of the film audience this is a scary thought, change in general being pretty frightening and also I’m not sure people want to abandon films the way they think of them now. Again, for the record, I do not believe we are witnessing the beginning of the end of 2D filmmaking, but I think that thought fuels this debate on some level.
So what’s basically been happening is this: Avatar’s gigantic box office “doesn’t count” go the arguments, because of X. Inflation, higher ticket prices for 3D, The gigantic negative and marketing costs, etc. So, should box office tallies come with asterisks, or is money just money to be counted regardless of how it is spent.
This takes a couple of forms, but the basic argument is that Avatar isn’t that big a success because when you adjust for inflation it isn’t the number 2 or 3 film of all time, it’s number 36. And it hasn’t passed Titanic, or even come close, because that film is number 6 by adjusted count. And that nothing can hold a candle to Gone With The Wind, because by adjusted count it has grossed over 1.5 Billion dollars in North America alone. Check out the list and get a sense of the way the numbers break down for all of these films.
Avatar has a long way to go before it can truly be considered a success, right? Well, only if you use this incredible array of faulty logic as your yardstick. It says that number 36 on an all time list is bad. For Avatar to really be successful it has to beat Gone With the Wind.
By conservative estimate, there have been more than 50,000 feature films produced, and that is only by the North American studio system. Worldwide who knows how many films have gotten made. Even if we are only comparing it to studio product, that 36th place (and it’s bound to go higher over the next 2 months - maybe as high as 16th place when all is said and done) is still a pretty unbelieveable result. 36th all time places Avatar in the top .07% of all films ever made. Is this enough to change everything? who knows, but what I do know is that The Jazz Singer, a movie which really did change everything, isn’t even on this list.
The list isn’t actually adjusted for true inflation anyways. It’s adjusted for ticket price inflation. You can check this pretty easily (just type in Titanic’s real dollar total and 1997 starting year - you’ll get a number a lot lower than the one on the list). Since the mid ‘80’s, when the central banks “broke the back” of inflation, we’ve enjoyed exceptionally stable pricing. Not everything has been stable, though, because inflation rates are an average of how much everything costs. Some things increase at faster than the rate of inflation. Entertainment is one of those things. Movie tickets are quite a bit more expensive, in relative terms, than they ever used to be.
In fact, one of the ironies is that the exact same people who complain that Avatar’s b.o. shouldn’t count are the very same people who complain that movies cost too much. Yes, it costs more to go out to the movies now, as a percentage of overall income. This means that people are willing to pay more than they used to to go see a film. A lot more if the film is in Imax 3D, as it turns out. This doesn’t negate the result, just the opposite. Consumers are willing to pay more to see Avatar than they were to see Star Wars. A better comparison would use real inflation since that’s a better gauge of consumer interest. Selling fewer tickets to people willing to pay more is just as legitimate a way of tracking popularity as anything else.
Movies are the only business where we even consider not using real dollars. Ever check on how successful a rock tour is? Or an art auction? We always use total dollars taken, not total number or buyers. When Halo 3 got released the only number mentioned by everyone was how much money it made. Nobody “qualified” it by saying that the original Halo had cost less to buy and had therefore sold more copies. Nobody cares, because video games (just like movies) are a for-profit business.
Avatar’s 3D inflated total is even more amazing when you consider the fact that it is also playing in 2d at regular prices. Since the very beginning of the run those 2d cinemas are the ones that haven’t been selling out. Moviegoers overwhelmingly have chosen the more expensive presentation format, because it is worth it to them.
Since I brought Halo 3 into this, I might as well mention one other thing. Movies cannot possibly occupy the same central location in people’s entertainment universe that they once did. When GWTW was released in 1939, movies were the general form of entertainment. Their only real competition was books, even Vaudeville had been killed off by film going after Jolson did his thing. Compare that to today. Videogames, VOD, DVD and Blu Ray rental and sales, social media, etc etc. Movies are not the only thing we choose, any more than the networks are what we watch on TV. More choice is good, but more choice means a smaller overall audience for any one choice. Again think of the significance of any film getting anywhere close to the success of Avatar in that environment.
We can think of 1980 as the watershed perhaps. Home video, video game consoles and home computers all closely follow 1980. On that all time adjusted list, if you look only at films in the “modern era” (post home entertainment and other distractions - 1980) Avatar ranks 12th, and it should eventually wind up 5th. If you further adjust for real inflation instead of movie ticket inflation, it would be on a trajectory for 3rd. This is a successful film even with the adjustments, so long as those adjustments have some sort of logical basis. If you’re going to adjust have a little more consistency to your baselines.
