Avatar 2: James Cameron Gets Trolled For Lowering The Box Office Breakeven From $2 Billion To $1.5 Billion, “Looks Like He’s Saying The First Number Comes In His Mind”

As I've maintained, it's murky - even Cameron himself is second-guessing and not asserting certainty!

If an insider with his resume can't speak with certainty, I'm just an outsider looking in who's going to simplify as consistently as I can rather than argue a degree of certainty I'm in no position to prove/defend.

That's why the Insiders' Formula has so few variables in the equation! Gross/2 minus production budget. All the rest is smoke and mirrors and secret sauce details to which I am not privy.

What's curious is, how could he not have been sure? Maybe he was, but fellow movie-makers slapped his wrist for giving away the store by talking numbers in to granular a way - maybe he was forced to retract to prevent people from figuring too much out?

It's now topped $1.5Bn, paying $3.30

Cameron lowered his breakeven estimate to $1.5Bn (see my post above), and here we are and I would not have been willing to believe he'd be worried about making money on a movie paying north of $3 especially given it wouldn't have required a ton of advertising, as if no one has heard of him or the franchise. I'm actually chuckling to myself thinking about this!

A:TWoW has hit $1.7Bn, now paying $3.72 which is now above the average pay of $3.63 across the 2800+ titles from 1924 to present in my movie ROI database.

Here's a new number to watch for: $1.89Bn. Across all the first sequels, the average pay is 35% of the first installment's pay. Avatar (2009) paid $11.74, 35% of which would be a ROI of $4.10 x the A:TWoW budget of $460M is box office of $1.89Bn. If he hits that, he'll be on par for first sequels. (Profitability by sequel generally drops off a cliff from here, which makes the exceptions that much more notable).

Interesting article.

@wonder2wonder said:

Interesting article.

Indeed it is!

I'm not an insider and (currently) not a producer, so I'm not particularly interested in "opening weekend" at all. Old school, to me, is a movie comes out that people don't know what to think about, but as their friends see it and say "wow, you gotta see [insert title here]", people are compelled to go see it so they can be a part of the conversation. That's how I remember the experience of Star Wars back in 1977.

When I was a kid, it was the "number of weeks" the movie was in theatres that indicated its success. Of course, in order to see a movie more than once, you had to go to the theatre more than once, so, the longer it remained in theatres, the more chance you had to go see it. That's how I remember Star Wars.

This article you provided calls this "legs". Back then, opening couldn't be that big a deal because some people would stay away to hear what their friends thought about it first; then they'd go.

My frustration with opening weekend includes the simple fact of supply - as long as there are more people who want to see a movie than enough good theatre seats to accommodate, who wants to go on opening weekend and sit down in the first row or at the very back on the left side of the theatre? Who wants to stand in line for concessions, have no place to put your jacket once you get through all the "excuse me, pardon me" to get to your seat...NOT ME!

My question to you @wonder2wonder is: when did YOU go see A:TWoW? Was it opening weekend? Or did you wait for fan reviews? Or...?

@DRDMovieMusings said:

My question to you @wonder2wonder is: when did YOU go see A:TWoW? Was it opening weekend? Or did you wait for fan reviews? Or...?

I saw it on 16 December 2022 in IMAX 3D. It was very long, but I didn't mind, though I did feel my age. I was completely immersed and some parts were so soothing, that I started to doze off and it felt like I was on Pandora and when I opened my eyes, I didn't know where I was.

I've been at a movie marathon, seeing all three "Lord of the Rings" movies, sitting in the theater for almost 10 hours, with 2 breaks, and that was quite an experience. Perhaps there will be one of Avatar in 2024/2025 and then I won't even wake up and stay on Pandora forever.

@DRDMovieMusings said:

I've never been a big fan of counting dollars in isolation, since inflation makes the question murky for all those who are not economists (and I rarely refer to "adjusted for inflation" tallies either, although, I'm going to in this paragraph!). To say that Top Gun: Maverick is Tom Cruise's first movie to top $1Bn isn't as big a deal to me once we consider that there wasn't enough money in the demand pool to generate that kind of money in, say, 1986 or 1992. The first movie in my database to crack $1bn is Titanic, 1997 (back to Cameron, right!) which is more a reflection of the availability of demand into which they could sell enough tickets to hit that number. I say that because the highest grossing movie, adjusted for inflation, is STILL Gone with the Wind, released in 1939. It has "only" generated $402M but, compared to the eight other movies in my dbase released in 1939 that together produced an average of $7M in revenue, GwtW is huge...had the economy in 1939 been what it was in 1997, blasting over $1Bn would have happened way back then, too.

Generally, though, ranking movies by revenue by release year has some value in giving an idea what movies people were talking about a lot (think about the watercooler talk generated by movies such as Fatal Attraction or Basic Instinct!)

One metric I devised for my own comparative purposes was to measure the box office revenue as a percentage of all the revenue for movies in that year that I have in my database. This would give me an idea of the "market share" of any movie vs. its competition that year. I hardly ever mention this stat in comments here on TMDb just because it's accessible from revenue alone to get a sense of which movies touched cultural zeitgeist level (although, by no means linear...Terrifier 2 is being talked about lots, and its profit is incredible, but its revenue itself is relatively paltry, right?

@DRDMovieMusings If I haven't said it before I'll say it now: your investigations have really intrigued me since I first realized the extent of your work. Huge thanks for opening up this rabbit hole for me!

My big curiosity is the intersection of financial success (ROI) and artistic success (not sure what gauge we'd use for that...??). Not to give you more work(!) but have you ever thought of incorporating some type of artistic/critical parameters in your table? For example RottenTomatoes score, or AFI ranking?

My guess is we'd see some faint correlation between artistic merit & financial success, but that would max out considerably below the financial success of crowd-pleasers. Example: 2001 A Space Odyssey vs. Star Wars. Both financially successful (I think 2001 was?), but I'm sure 2001's ROI is well below that of Star Wars.

@rooprect said:

@DRDMovieMusings If I haven't said it before I'll say it now: your investigations have really intrigued me since I first realized the extent of your work. Huge thanks for opening up this rabbit hole for me!

Thanks for sharing this interest with me!

My big curiosity is the intersection of financial success (ROI) and artistic success (not sure what gauge we'd use for that...??). Not to give you more work(!) but have you ever thought of incorporating some type of artistic/critical parameters in your table? For example RottenTomatoes score, or AFI ranking?

My initial motivation for even starting down this rabbit hole was to better understand the inelastic correlation between artistic merit and money-making. Cinephiles and movie buffs recognize very quickly that so many "great" movies (which is to say, films of artistic merit) did not make a lot of money, while movies that pander to the more common elements often made lots and lots and lots of money. I hated letting box office be the basis of the story. Of course, there are good movies that made money, and bad movies that didn't - the relationship really is all over the place. I can't imagine where to even begin looking for some objective correlation between the two.

My guess is we'd see some faint correlation between artistic merit & financial success, but that would max out considerably below the financial success of crowd-pleasers.

It's really faint, if existent at all. Great movies often challenge people, and sometimes people don't want to be challenged when they're looking for an escape. Consider how anything that is remotely progressive nowadays is often labelled "woke" by all the conservative snowflakes who must clutch their pearls at the slightest challenge to the status quo. Realism can be a turn-off. There was a lot of talk about trying to identify who the enemy was in Top Gun: Maverick, and the makers all agreed they did not want to name a specific country and risk alienating audiences and reducing ticket sales, so they deliberately avoided it.

I chuckle when people think Suburbicon was "almost a good movie until they went off on the race tangent" when racism was the basis of the true story upon which the movie was based! I think it was a great movie, but it lost money. Too many people just did not want to face a story that shows racism and its ugliness. Movie makers must make choices - do some movies to make money, do other movies to tell important stories. There's art, and there's entertainment, and they're not always in harmony.

Example: 2001 A Space Odyssey vs. Star Wars. Both financially successful (I think 2001 was?), but I'm sure 2001's ROI is well below that of Star Wars.

Great examples! And, you're right on the money! Both did well, but Star Wars did more well! 2001: A Space Odyssey paid a marvelous $6.54 while Star Wars paid a ridiculous $70.49

For many, 2001 was an emotional experience, people really connected with it at a particularly dark time in American history. And then, of course, Star Wars, while not as poignant (or even original) a story, was a watershed moment in movie history - it was a harmless, escapist fantasy that also changed the game behind the cameras.

@DRDMovieMusings said:

Great movies often challenge people, and sometimes people don't want to be challenged when they're looking for an escape. Consider how anything that is remotely progressive nowadays is often labelled "woke" by all the conservative snowflakes who must clutch their pearls at the slightest challenge to the status quo. Realism can be a turn-off. There was a lot of talk about trying to identify who the enemy was in Top Gun: Maverick, and the makers all agreed they did not want to name a specific country and risk alienating audiences and reducing ticket sales, so they deliberately avoided it.

I chuckle when people think Suburbicon was "almost a good movie until they went off on the race tangent" when racism was the basis of the true story upon which the movie was based! I think it was a great movie, but it lost money. Too many people just did not want to face a story that shows racism and its ugliness. Movie makers must make choices - do some movies to make money, do other movies to tell important stories. There's art, and there's entertainment, and they're not always in harmony.

Insightful thoughts! I love what you said about the conservative snowflake factor (CSF? 😅) which, I'm only now learning, has dogged and thwarted cinema since the early days. Recently I've been watching pre-Code* films and comparing them with the Code era, and seeing the noticeable decline in artistic content of the latter. But what's interesting is how, after the initial Code wave of church ladies did their damage, clever filmmakers began figuring out ways to sneak progressive ideas under the radar--Hitchcock being a fine example. The result was actually more artistic content, if we accept that subtlety is itself a characteristic of great art.

(*Quick explainer for anyone like me who didn't know: The Hays Code was censorship from 1934 thru the 1960s, whereby the conservative snowflakes threw out anything they deemed immoral or offensive. We lost a lot of great cinema thanks to that. Anything even remotely suggesting sex outside marriage, LGBTQ+ acceptance, or daring to call out religious hypocrisy was tossed on the cutting room floor. All criminal characters had to be caught and punished in the end, because the idea of a criminal getting away was too "woke" for the right wing "law & order" moralists. Talk about the ultimate conservative snowflake blizzard.)

Anyway, yes absolutely, the CSF hugely impacted--and still impacts--a film's profitability if it's not in line with the moralists, i.e. if it presents anything new. And isn't the whole point of art to present new ideas? So that's the formula spoiler right there. Profits are aligned with "average" artistic content. The rebels & upstarts are fighting upstream.

Your database would have to somehow figure out the numeric value of CSF for any given year and add that back into the ROI to show CSF-adjusted-ROI, just like adjusting for inflation.

Hey @rooprect the system is not letting me reply to your splendid post. I'll figure out a way to reply as soon as I can.

@DRDMovieMusings said:

A:TWoW has hit $1.7Bn, now paying $3.72 which is now above the average pay of $3.63 across the 2800+ titles from 1924 to present in my movie ROI database.

Here's a new number to watch for: $1.89Bn. Across all the first sequels, the average pay is 35% of the first installment's pay. Avatar (2009) paid $11.74, 35% of which would be a ROI of $4.10 x the A:TWoW budget of $460M is box office of $1.89Bn. If he hits that, he'll be on par for first sequels. (Profitability by sequel generally drops off a cliff from here, which makes the exceptions that much more notable).

Okay, A:TWoW has hit $1.95Bn, paying $4.25 which now puts this film above average for sequel profitability. (that rate of 35% is likely to move as I feed more sequel data into my database and it recalibrates, but it is still a decent rate to work with).

James Cameron knows something about making movies that make money.

@DRDMovieMusings said:

James Cameron knows something about making movies that make money.

Yep I gotta give credit where credit is due, he seems to have pulled it off. Although I'm not yet convinced it's worth watching, in terms of profitability I gotta take off my hat. And eat it 😅

James Cameron has done it again: $2.024 billion!

Now at $2.304 billion.

. "How is that possible if no one has seen it?" - RLM