Cameron's 'Titanic,' 'Avatar' poised to be Nos. 1 and 2 all-time
Even for a film set in outer space, "Avatar's" ability to defy gravity has confounded the movie industry.
For Hollywood, even the most successful films see their box-office take drop by 50 percent after the first week. In its fourth week, however, "Avatar" earned $48 million, marking its fourth straight week as the top-grossing film in the US and still only 37 percent off its first week draw ($77 million).
It creates a unique 1-2 for "Avatar" writer and director James Cameron. Already, he is the writer and director of the two top-grossing movies of all-time worldwide. His last movie before "Avatar," "Titanic," is No. 1 with $1.8 billion. With $1.3 billion so far, "Avatar" displaced "Lord of the Rings: Return of the King" as No. 2 worldwide this weekend.
Now, in the US, "Avatar" is only $100 million behind "The Dark Knight" for No. 2 all-time.
Movies made for the big screen
Mr. Cameron's formula is no secret: a heavy dose of Hollywood. But in a business forever trying to outdo itself, where special effects have made annihilating entire worlds as mundane as opening a bag of chips, Cameron's success is instructive.
In short, he makes films made for theaters 鈥� must-see movies so overwhelming to the senses that even Blu-Ray can never do it justice.
And for Cameron, it is also the triumph of the story behind the story. For "Avatar," Cameron helped create a new language and write a 350-page encyclopedia of the science and culture of his fictional world Pandora.
"There aren't many examples of fully detailed worlds in the movies," Cameron . "You've got the Tolkien [Lord of the Rings] universe, the Gene Roddenberry [Star Trek] universe, the 'Star Wars' universe. You can't compete with that kind of lore, but what we can do is give the illusion that there's that kind of depth and detail."
The 3-D factor
Moviemaking Cameron-style is not for executives who are faint of heart. Unofficial estimates suggest the film cost at least $430 million to make and market. But Cameron's experiments often bring his studio financial reward in the end.
Much of Cameron's 12-year hiatus between "Titanic" and "Avatar" was spent learning 鈥� and inventing 鈥� the tools to shoot a groundbreaking movie in 3-D. "I was learning a craft and trade of 3-D production, gearing up." Cameron told USA Today. "Whatever movie I was going to make, it was going to be in 3-D."
New data show that 3-D is driving "Avatar's" strong staying power at the box office. Some 80 percent of the movie's receipts for this past weekend came from 3-D screens, . On opening weekend, that figure was 71 percent.
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