Well done Avengers: Endgame.
You deserve round of applause.
Last weekend the latest Avengers saga officially surpassed Avatar as the highest grossing movie in human history. To date, it has grossed just over 2.79 billion dollars worldwide, with a few more million likely to come.
So Marvel, Disney, the Russo brothers and every person involved with both the movie and the entire MCU deserve to be proud. Their baby rewrote history and this is their moment.
But having said that, let’s have a little perspective and stop using box office as a barometer of a film’s success and worth. Because it’s a false metric.
No one’s saying to discard it or it or that a movie’s box office doesn’t determine its success. At the end of the day Hollywood is a business that lives and dies by box office receipts and bases every decision on its bottom line. The more money a movie makes, the more successful it is, end of story.
But comparing a block buster’s total gross today to a film released ten years ago? That’s a fool’s game. And while fans were rejoicing that Endgame surpassed Titanic shortly after it’s release, no one wanted to be bothered with the fact that Endgame had over twenty years of advantages going for it.
The same with Avatar, Endgame’s latest victim.
The first thing to consider is inflation-a word Hollywood execs desperately avoid when discussing a film’s bottom line. The simple fact is that tickets are more expensive now than when Avatar stormed theatres in 2009. And when Titanic was ruling the cineplex in 1997, the average movie ticket was nearly half what it is today.
If you adjust for inflation, Avatar is still more successful than Endgame. And Titanic is more successful than both of them. But E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial beats all of them. So does The Sound of Music and the original Star Wars. And when talking about inflation-adjusted success, the one movie that rules Hollywood’s record books is the eighty year old Gone With The Wind, which would have grossed over 3.3 billion dollars if it sold the same amount of tickets today.
But even that isn’t a fair number when everything is taken into account. IMAX and 3-D is a way of life now, and along with specialty theatres that turn movie going into an experience (complete with waiters and menus that include alcohol) they pad a movie’s earnings substantially. That 3.3 billion Gone With The Wind would make today is based on the average price of regular tickets. Toss in a few hundred theatres showing it in 3-D and IMAX or any of the other options available to contemporary movie-goers and that number may be much closer to 4 billion.
Avatar was able to best Titanic because it pushed the frontiers of cinematic technology. No one went to see it for the story (which was basically Pochahonatas in space), but instead to see the groundbreaking three dimensional effects which were brand new in 2009. Now? While few movies are as impressive as Avatar, 3-D is pretty standard hat. In fact, it can be argued that if Avatar was released today it might not be as successful because there would be no novelty to attract curious audiences to it in droves.
The same can be said of Titanic. One of the reasons it was Hollywood’s reigning box office king was because so many people saw it so many times. It was spectacle on a scale never seen before. It also bears mentioning that both Titanic and Avatar were Christmas releases, a time of year not nearly as competitive as summer, when Endgame was unleashed on an audience eagerly awaiting the conclusion to the MCU’s Infinity Saga.
And if we’re driving down that particular road, Hollywood is a much more competitive game now than it was even ten years ago. The summer schedule more closely resembles a meat grinder, its calendar crowded with a menu of fresh blockbusters that cannibalize each other mercilessly. Titanic and Avatar sat at the top of the box office food chain for months, while Endgame was the number one movie for two weeks. And it still soundly beat Titanic and nudged past Avatar by a nose.
A lot goes into making a blockbuster, including circumstances and variables which change from movie to movie and year to year. So using the same measure sticking to judge movies released years and even decades apart is pointless and kind of insulting to everyone involved in the conversation.
And that says nothing of escalating budgets, innovative (or catastrophically stupid) promotional campaigns, economic circumstances (the fact that Avatar enjoyed unprecedented success while the global economy tanked was either admirable or inevitable, depending on who you talk to) and shifting social trends (if someone told you ten years ago that a super-hero movie would become the highest grossing movie in history, you’d probably tell them to sober up).
Box office success may start with quality product and smart marketing, but it’s also a perfect storm of other factors.
So yes, Endgame deserves some well earned applause and recognition that it cleared a hurdle or two previous contenders didn’t. But don’t get too carried away thinking that it’s reign as current heavyweight champ happened in a vacuum and not as a result of advantages it enjoyed that Avatar didn’t. Just like how the former champ’s success was largely the result of advantages it’s predecessor didn’t enjoy.
Just remember that neither Avatar nor Endgame appear on the ten highest grossing movies of all time (post inflation, of course). Titanic, meanwhile clocks in at number five. And in the end, the champ remains-and will likely forever be-a civil war romance your grandparents saw in theatres.
Image via Movieweb.com
