elfwreck:

simonstuck493:

avatar was like the highest grossing movie of all time and yet its only impact on culture was to confuse people talking about the last airbender

I watched Avatar late - like, really late, more than a year after it stopped showing in theatres - and remember thinking, wow that’s gorgeous… and that was all. And then realized that, money aside, the movie was a total flop. It was the most expensive animated black-light poster ever made, and designed to have absolutely nothing get in the way of the breathtaking graphics.

Nothing. Not even bad plot and dialogue. They weren’t good (there were a lot of cliches), but they weren’t cringe-inducing bad, either.

And I thought, “Cameron’s really done something incredible here - he’s got a movie with aliens with their own language, body-swapping, telepathic animal control, group mind-merging, soul-bonding, FLYING WILD DRAGONS, gorgeous and dangerous flora & fauna, evil space patrol, and levitating rocks. And fandom DOES. NOT. CARE.”

I had seen no pictures other than one or two screencaps of the aliens with grumbling about “yet another ‘what these people need is a honky!’ plotline.” Had heard no quotes from the movie. There’s no notable amount of fic. No usericons on LJ (which was big at the time). No meta, other than acknowledgement that this was another “white dudes rule” movie. Nada.

He managed to extract millions of dollars from the American public without making the smallest dent on their psyches, and that is an impressive talent. Biggest shared experience of modern America - more people saw it than the Avengers - and nobody remembers more than fragments of it, and nobody cares about that.