BadAtGender

Roman: Tanks? I can take on tanks. Planes? I took on planes. I even had a damn cruise missile drone riding my ass through downtown LA for all of you. And that was FINE! But what the HELL am I supposed to do about that?

Hmm... Hmm... I'm conflicted about which is better. They're both really good, but in very different ways. I would say, though, that while Alien is Ridley Scott's best film (by a pretty considerable margin, IMO), Aliens is NOT Cameron's best.

Some of it has to do with how we engage media. Many creators have a strong social media presence and interact with fans of their works, answering questions and such, even if there isn't anything being produced for said media at that moment. (Not exactly great example, but the animated Avatar fandom is still quite active, despite the Legend of Korra show ending over a year ago and the creators have since moved on to work on new projects. Even so, they're still engaged with the fans, which keeps up interest. But there are ALSO still comics being produced, so...) In contrast, James Cameron does not really do that. In fact, I wonder if he finds all the tie-in stuff superfluous and distracting. He's completely engaged in making the film and will leave the fans to do what they will, even if it means moving on to other properties for the time being. (Christopher Nolan is much the same, but in his case, when you're working on Batman, you don't need to do that engagement yourself.) My point isn't that you're wrong and Avatar will be loved (because I'm not about absolutes), but rather there are conclusions being drawn from imperfect information. And that we're also dealing with a strange situation. Final point. Prior to 2008, people in general didn't give a shit about Iron Man. He had some fans, but there wasn't anything even approaching the scale that's existed since. What happened was Marvel made a film about him that was good and entertaining. So people showed up and latched on. Then more films showed up to keep them engaged. If Cameron makes a film that's good and entertaining, people could show up in droves. They just need a little reminder.

Taking your two points last to first. Point 2: It's the internet. The shape of communication and opinion tends towards polarizing. Things are either Awesomeness or Total Crapsack, and it's difficult to say something with nuance and not get ignored. This applies to social media spaces, forums, and, yes, professional outlets. Herd mentalities abound and if you see a bunch of thinkpieces that are along certain lines, you're likely to get in on the action (or offer up a direct counterpoint.) (Aside: this actually may not exactly be due to the internet, although how social media technology is structured has something to do with it: Facebook affects communication in very different ways than the telephone, even ignoring all the bells and whistles. However, there's an argument to be made that how society has changed post 9/11 has led to a stronger polarization of ALL discussions, not just political ones. Things are either right or wrong, with less acceptance of grey area in between.) Point 1: Most major franchises have a fairly constant presence in the media landscape. Even in periods when there was no movie (or even a hint of a movie), Star Wars had novels, comics, cartoons, and so forth to keep audiences in the know. Marvel and DC characters extend back up to 75 years of near-constant publishing presence, in addition to their forays elsewhere. And while there can be a rough barometric to be said that because these things exist, the brands are more popular, it also means that people will think about them because they are reminded. Video games for almost every major property tend to come along every few years, at the most. Additionally, most major brands are OLD. For Live Action franchises, there are only a handful that have an original source material that's less than 20 years old. In comparison to many things, Star Wars' 38 year age makes it relatively young. Avatar is a very strange beast. It was a major tentpole picture, and one that was obviously designed to set up a franchise. However, partially due to Cameron's technical perfectionism, and probably partially due to how the business is structured so that new brands have a very hard time to get a foothold established. Avatar had a smattering of tie-in material at the time of its release, but since then there's basically been nothing. Do people not care? In a sense, yes, because there's nothing specifically to care about. Will people not care as we get closer to release? That's the big question. There is going to be a lot of advertising for this movie. There will be a lot of tie-in material. What effect that will have, especially if the films hit yearly from that point in remains to be seen. It's possible audiences will look at Avatar 2, collectively shrug, and give Cameron his first disappointment since The Abyss. It's possible they'll go "Oh, yeah. That was a thing that I liked" and then get wowed by the world again and get sucked in. We'll have to see... next Christmas or whenever it happens.

The Revenant - 22m The Forest - 10m The Masked Saint - 2m

You might say he has a Hardy-On for Tom.

Yeah, I resemble that. I was all in on the hate train at the time it was released. Something about how Cameron had betrayed nerds by making a chick flick. I didn't actually see it until last year. God, I cringe when I think about being part of the crowd who believed that TPM just HAD to become the biggest movie of all time, because something something really stupid argument. It is interesting how opinions have come around, both for Titanic and for Leo.

At the time of Avatar's release, Titanic was at the $600m mark. Avatar bested that in 47 days. (The Titanic 3D re-release came 3 years later.) At the time of Titanic's release, Star Wars had regained the number 1 spot from ET, thanks to the Special Edition release earlier in 1997. It was sitting at $460m. Titanic took 86 days to earn more. (I always forget that the Special Edition pushed Star Wars past ET before Titanic was released. ET at the time was literally just shy of $400m. Titanic took 66 days to earn $400m.)

Yeah. Exxdee's running away from us. The rest of us need to team up.

It would kind of be the director equivalent of McConnaughey.

What the hell, dude? It should be past that by the end of January.

I can't wait until the run is over so I can see how it stacks up in my Billion Dollar earner breakdown spreadsheet.

I'm going to bask in this for a very long time, because it's probably the best I'll ever do on any of the Winter/Summer games. He'll, I'd put it in my .sig if I could.

Is the Oscar BP nommed by the entire Academy or just some subset (as with other category)?

So we're a year down the line and most of the awards contenders have been widely released. What do people think? Was the competition in 2015 weaker than 2014 to the point that if Paramount had waited a year and actually done a real awards push, Selma could be a frontrunner this time around?

It's really hard to tell on these boards, especially from people who are super invested in one franchise or another.

Uh... You think this coming Saturday isn't going to be any bigger than Monday? Seriously, even as a conservative prediction, it should do something like 11/18/11 this weekend. Getting under $40m is unlikely.

As Tele's said before, the nature of mocap means that the production schedule could be a lot less than you'd expect from the point that they start shooting. They can shoot a lot faster and the post-production is going on at the same time. At least in the case of this film, they've also already had an extremely long pre-production cycle to iron a lot of things out. There are big budget films that don't have the mocap advantages that can get rolling from shoot date to release in under a year. There's plenty of time for Avatar 2.

The last five films to set the DOM record got a BP nom. (Avatar, Titanic, ET, Star Wars, Jaws). And probably before that. Did Jaws take the DOM crown from GWTW? Or something else. JP didn't get the DOM crown. However, all of those films were quite different from TFA. None were sequels or (at the time) known to be part of a franchise. All of them had very strong filmmaker visions that guided them that doesn't seem to be the case, here. TFA marks a big change in the nature of the DOM crown. In the past, it signified grand, original films, which the Academy likes to get behind. From here on, it's probably going to be held by franchise ventures. I don't know if they'd be very favorable to that. Only a small handful of sequels have gotten BP noms. (TS3, RotK, TTT, Godfather 3, Godfather 2? Any others?) Additionally, the Academy isn't exactly favorable towards Disney. Only four films that have had BV distribution have gotten BP noms. Two of them were Pixar joints (Up and TS3) and two of them were Dreamworks ventures (The Help and Lincoln). Honestly, I see Inside Out as more likely to get a nom than TFA.

Well, yes and no. It would give us a definitive list of what movies have sold the most tickets, but absent the context of the what the market was like during a film's release(s) it's not really going to be an accurate statement of success. If you're comparing a film, you need to pick a basis for comparison that makes sense. Sometimes, yes, admissions may be the best. But at others you may want just the straight dollar values. And sometimes you'll want to do some inflation adjustment, either average ticket price or real dollar adjustment. But all of those are just tools. You need to understand why they do what they do as you use them. Too often people on the forum have a very narrow focus on finding the biggest and best of whatever. Opening Weekend. Domestic Gross. Worldwide Gross. Whatever. It's myopic because it starts to lose any value. If you only care about that one thing, you're going to miss a lot of the more fun and interesting details. There's so much more to box office tracking than breaking records. Really, I think a lot of the discussion on this thread seems to be hovering around the question about whether GWTW or Star Wars IV is the more successful movie. And... I don't think that can be answered. In some ways, it's probably GWTW. In others it's ANH. (In others, it's Titanic. And in others it's Avatar.) Context matters. There is never going to be an absolute answer. This isn't just a movie box office problem. Any reasonably built up system that lasts a while is going to have enough going on that there will be too many details to really pin down absolutes. If you follow baseball, who's the greatest player ever? Best all time pitcher? You start asking around to fans and you'll get dozens of answers, and they can all be backed up by stats and reasons and so forth. But you'll likely never get a firm answer. The game has been played for too long with too many changing factors that you can't really make a firm conclusion. And all that's fine. We're not robots.

Updating for actuals. Nothing changed for Part 1. Spotlight slipped up past Carol in part 3.

Hey, anything to undermine those rigid gender roles.

Oh, yeah. I love the series. I didn't find it mind breaking so much, probably because I didn't seem to start running the mental loops that most people I talked to did: they kept trying to figure out whether the characters were men or women. Once I got what she was doing with the pronoun thing, I just accepted it at face value. In my mental image, ALL the characters are women. Some of them have beards, though.

Yeah. There's only so much you can ask your audience to deal with. It's why you usually find sci-fi novels to have pretty plain and straightforward language. I once tried to start a novel where my narrator had a very idiosyncratic linguistic style. Even beyond the problem with writing the damn thing (because it broke my brain), I realize that I was asking too much of the reader, because the world was also fantastic. Once people are familiar with the world, you can play around.

What defines a "true epic"? Arguably, he's been smart enough to realize the limitations of the tools he's had available. If you know your budget is only going to be $30m, then you'll probably not try to make the next High Fantasy film with a climax battle that requires hundreds of extras. You'll figure out what sort of stories you can do within that budget and go from there.