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Avatar's success is in the marketing
Characters from Avatar
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Bill Radke: Blue 3D humanoids are coming today. The movie Avatar opens in theaters. Can this movie turn a profit when it took at least $300 million to make? As Marketplace's Jennifer Collins reports there's almost no way on Earth it won't.
Avatar: You're not in Kansas anymore. You're on Pandora.
Jennifer Collins: Some estimates put the price tag for Avatar at half a billion dollars. That would make it the most expensive movie of all time. Around $150 million went into marketing alone.
Robert Thompson: You could not be alive on much of planet Earth without knowing this thing is coming.
Robert Thompson is a professor of media and pop culture at Syracuse University. He says mega-marketing efforts like these almost guarantee a mega-opening.
Thompson: It may turn out that the real artistic achievement of Avatar is the way that it was packaged, sold and marketed.
But even if Avatar ultimately disappoints at the U.S. box office, it doesn't really matter, says Paul Dergarabedian of Hollywood.com.
Paul Dergarabedian: The key to Avatar's success is its performance in the international arena.
Dergarabedian says the U.S. used to make up about half of a film's total box office revenue. Now, for big budget movies like Avatar, it's only about a third.
I'm Jennifer Collins for Marketplace.
Avatar is a classic scenario you've seen in Hollywood epics from Dances With Wolves, Dune, District 9 and The Last Samurai, where a white guy manages to get himself accepted into a closed society of people of color and eventually becomes its most awesome member.
If we think of Avatar and its ilk as white fantasies about race, what kinds of patterns do we see emerging in these fantasies?
A white man who was one of the oppressors switches sides at the last minute, assimilating into the alien culture and becoming its savior.
These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color - their cultures, their habitats, and their populations.
The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the "alien" cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become "race traitors," and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed.
This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It's not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it's not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It's a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.
