I want to start out by saying that I truly enjoyed the experience of watching James Cameron ply his skills on Avatar. The 2D version. The story has nice new wrappings on an age old story. By that I mean the story isn’t new, but it is injected with present-day actors we all want to see in a movie. You can’t go wrong with that premise and combination. (This is the magic to movie- remakes… today’s actors in yesterday’s movies.)
But on its way to trampling every single sale record in the history books, Avatar is putting us through our paces to get us to spend our money to help it be such. As it stands, the movie has already made $2.74 billion at the box office and other points of sale. That’s a nice piece of change for everyone involved in the project!
But it made that much by various stages of ingenious presentation, marketing and product delivery.
1) Being in 3D, the consumer finds themselves being charged extra for that experience, helping the movie charge ahead in the total number of dollars “made” at the box office and introducing a new business model to creating movie magic profits. It was a new gimmic and the consumer could not resist. At least Cameron did it properly with Real 3D.
2) What surprised me was when the Avatar DVD was released for Earth Day, just how many copies of the bare bones DVD were sold. No extras, no nothing was on the DVD. In fact it was the shorter, 162-minute edition. We, John Q. Public really wanted to add it to our collection as soon as possible. I didn’t. I’m waiting for a better package deal. (Being patient can truly suck though… I can attest to that!)
3) We have a re-release of Avatar coming to IMAX and select 3D theaters with 8 extra minutes of footage. Those 8 extra minutes add up to a new glimpse of something that wasn’t in the original screening. Or as noted, “About every 15 minutes you’ll get something new that you haven’t seen before…”
Which means for 171 minutes, you’re getting a new moment, a new scenic flash. All for an extra 4.7% more film.
The new moments will be:
- In the (Na’vi) school,
- more night bioluminescence, (Because you can never get enough floating glow orbs!)
- new creatures,
- 1 new action scene.
If these scenes that were carved out of the original and now being reinserted are each about 2 minutes long, will you actually notice it’s a new scene? I usually don’t catch new scenes like this until someone points it out. Maybe we’ll have a James Cameron avatar at the bottom of the screen, pointing up to show us a new scene moment!?
4) Then the newest 2D release of Avatar to DVD and Blu-ray will have 16 extra minutes of footage. Do you see where this is going? Every release has a little extra in it, making us want to snag that version next. When will it stop? When it’s a 6-hour event? It could become a mini-series if they’re not careful. Something the FX network could snatch up.
5) James Cameron is planning a 3D Blu-ray release, but they’re biding their time, waiting for home entertainment systems to have a larger installed consumer base before releasing that new version.
So the sales cycle goes on and on. I think the new re-release is a great pitch for trying to get Avatar into the top-10 of all-time number of tickets sold.
Per Box Office Mojo, Avatar ranks 14th in all-time estimated number of tickets sold at the box office. This upcoming re-release weekend should probably push it into at least 13th and overtake Ben-Hur and maybe even 12th, putting The Empire Strikes Back down a notch.
Per BOM, the 1st place movie is Gone with the Wind, having sold an estimated 202+ million tickets while Avatar has sold an estimated 95.9 million tickets. (It Avatar was 26th back in January, so the movie continues its impressive climb up that all-time ladder!) To me, that’s the real quantifier of a movie, the number of tickets sold. I say that because somewhere down the road, even the B-movies will cost so much that they’ll start riddling the box-office charts and sometimes, we need to remember the true classics that once dominated the movie theater.
[THR]
