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Just about every thread in this sub forum is about how the MCU sucks, DCU sucks, Star Wars sucks, Disney sucks, Indiana Jones sucks, etc., that studios only play it safe by making sequels and reboots, and that Avatar is forgettable because it plays it safe, appealing to all quadrants and foreign markets, not challenging the audience. It’s the same issue. The only thing Avatar/2 even tries to innovate on are special effects. It made a huge amount of money because people don’t want challenging movies or risky movies. They want to play it safe and see big empty spectacles, for which Avatar is …the avatar. This forgettable movie is one of the most profitable ever made because everyone who complains about creative bankruptcy and rehashes and bland safe movies is lying.

To be fair to Avatar, while the movies themselves are very safe, their production is not.

I mean James Cameron throwing 250 million per movie with no previous buildup (and a decade between movies, plus the post-COVID cinema market) was definitely a risk.

I get more entertainment from an Acti-Blizz cinematic than I did the entirety of Avatar 1. Suffice it to say I did not see 2, nor was ever motivated to engage in any community.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Just about every thread in this sub forum is about how the MCU sucks, DCU sucks, Star Wars sucks, Disney sucks, Indiana Jones sucks, etc.,

Hmmmm...... maybe the problem isn't that all these different forms of media sucks.......


You know the old saying. If you meet a jerk, that is one jerk. If everyone you meet is a jerk.... maybe you are the jerk.



/S..... maybe?

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Just about every thread in this sub forum is about how the MCU sucks, DCU sucks, Star Wars sucks, Disney sucks, Indiana Jones sucks, etc., that studios only play it safe by making sequels and reboots, and that Avatar is forgettable because it plays it safe, appealing to all quadrants and foreign markets, not challenging the audience.

But that's not what this thread is about. It's asking a very pertinent question which I will restate: why has Avatar, despite its enormous globe-spanning success, failed to make any lasting impression on the popular culture?

A TV show that didn't even last for three full seasons from 1966 to 1968 has had a far bigger impact. How did that happen?

The answer is that it resonated. Avatar didn't. And I'll give a spoiler here - I didn't see either Avatar film. I don't feel like I missed anything. No one drops lines from Avatar that I feel compelled to look up. Are there any good lines?

Same with scenes or moments. I never saw American Pie, but I know the catchphrase "one time, at band camp," because people use it from time to time.

And that's the point - there's no cultural compelling reason for someone to see it in order to get all the cultural references. What's Avatar's equivalent to "life long, and prosper," or "may the Force be with you?"

At least Titanic had Celine Dion wailing away on every radio station on earth for a few months. "My heart will gooooo ooooonn..."

Heck Firefly has a cultural impact (at least in Geek Culture) and that didn't even get one full season!






I feel like if you took Avatar's technical and CGI budget and gave it the story writing and artistic design guide of a studio like Ghibli you'd be onto a massive massive winner on almost all fronts.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:


At least Titanic had Celine Dion wailing away on every radio station on earth for a few months. "My heart will gooooo ooooonn..."

All I see are 'Paint me like one of your French girls" memes. Or what ever the line is. And that's all I know about that movie.

It's been mentioned more than once in this thread that nobody quotes lines from Avatar, yet my friends and I do occasionally quote it. Mainly "that's a potent mix, gives me the goosebumps" in relevant situations. Maybe I just have weird friends.

 ZergSmasher wrote:
It's been mentioned more than once in this thread that nobody quotes lines from Avatar, yet my friends and I do occasionally quote it. Mainly "that's a potent mix, gives me the goosebumps" in relevant situations. Maybe I just have weird friends.

Possibly, but that isn't how "culture" works. If out of a hundred thousand people three of them are quoting the film it doesn't suddenly become culturally relevant.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

 Ahtman wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
So, if you don’t want to take a risk on unknowns, do you prefer to spend your ticket budget on an aggressively mediocre spectacle flick that will entertain you for 2 hours and leave you with nothing to talk about, or do you watch an MCU/DCU movie with the caliber of a Multiverse of Madness or a Black Adam, knowing it will be dreck you can poop on for weeks?

I don't know how to tell you this but you have more options than "meh", Marvel/DC, or smaller films, and this part will really blow your mind, but if there isn't a film that appeals to you at the moment you aren't actually forced to see one. Not required by law or anything! You can choose just not to go to the theater at that time. Police won't show up or anything.

I think we’re talking at cross purposes here. If one is complaining that all the big movies are mediocre pablum, and one wants that to change, just staying home doesn’t help. Supporting riskier movies will lead to more interesting movies being made.

Never going to the movies again is a solution, but not one that leads to better movies. I like going to the movies. I don’t want to surrender to the complete creative death of an institution.

I like going to the movies as well. But whatever the scale of the movie, it has to interest me 1st somehow. I'm not just going to support something on the basis of it not being a CGI tentpole/costing insane amounts to produce.

In the case of the two Avatars? I knew ahead of time that the stories were "meh". I went anyways - specifically to see 3d CGI/FX spectacle(s) on an IMaX screen. Because no matter how big a TV I manage to cram into my living room? Avatar will never look as good as it did when seen in it's proper environment. And it's not worth re-watching either one story, character, or acting wise without seeing those effects properly.

I wonder if it’s relevant that a fair chunk of the film uses subtitles. Half the cast uses a fictional language, which must limit the ability to get quotable lines

 Paint it Pink wrote:
Okay, I've red the thread, and what I'd say is that birds of a feather flock together.

By that I mean Dakka hosts people the majority of whom don't like Avatar.

I like Avatar, it's not my favourite SF movie, but it's up there. I suspect that the fans of the film are not on this forum, I could be wrong. Or, people don't want to get into confrontations over something like whether or not Avatar is a good film.

The fact that one of the first complaints were the theme of climate catastrophe, and mankind's hand in this happening. It made a lot of people very angry.

So angry, I would argue that removes the ability of most people to appreciate what works and what doesn't work in the film.

The film is both lighter and darker than such a response warrants. Lighter, because the technology of travel between the stars has been achieved. Darker, because Pandora is not a planet of primitives that you think it is, rather it is test that the humans are likely to fail.

Everythign on Pandora are constructed to lure the humans in. A test of sorts, the sort that determines whether mankind should be eliminated.

It is in short, the worst scenario; it is the Dark Forest (a greater threat exists and that threat is what made Pandora).

I don't think the problem is with people disagreeing with the message, so much as how clumsily the message is communicated, complete with the Great White Saviour trope to top it all off. I don't have a problem with artists pointing out humans are messing up the planet, but that doesn't mean I like the way Avatar chose to handle it. Even with that being the case, the thread is about why Avatar has had no impact on culture, which can happen even with films people don't like. It's a weird caser of being hugely successful but just an utter void of resonance within pop culture. It's not even as if it made a cultural splash at the time and then faded away.

The biggest cultural impact is the name "Unobtainium".

 Easy E wrote:
The biggest cultural impact is the name "Unobtainium".

That was the point in the advertising that I realized it wasn't going to be worth watching.
Just hackneyed tropes that weren't even slightly obscured under a gloss.

 Flinty wrote:
I wonder if it’s relevant that a fair chunk of the film uses subtitles. Half the cast uses a fictional language, which must limit the ability to get quotable lines

Just to get this out of the way, I didn't even remember that the blue guys were speaking in their own language until you mentioned it...

Anyway, I'd expect the writers to have plenty of opportunity to have the characters say something that sticks. The movie is long enough and there are still plenty of humans there. I think that if they had something they wanted to force, they could have. George Lucas managed to make something as trivial as "hello there" an identifier for a character and did so in a movie trilogy whose, let's say not entirely uncontested quality spawned countless other, competing memes. Avatar doesn't have that, not that I remember anyway, because you don't just need the quotable lines, but also the circumstances that resonate with people. You can construct this as a recurring theme or have it in only a single scene, but you have to get all the elements right. Whether by design or accident. Even if you have two hours and change of dreary protagonists and blue people no one understands that are useless in this regard, you're still left with a bad guy who could fill the role. But he's just a cardboard cutout evil military dude with nothing to set him apart either.

I don't believe quantity matters. All it takes is one guy with one line in the right circumstances. And popular culture seems to be in agreement that that's just not there.

 Paint it Pink wrote:


The film is both lighter and darker than such a response warrants. Lighter, because the technology of travel between the stars has been achieved. Darker, because Pandora is not a planet of primitives that you think it is, rather it is test that the humans are likely to fail.

Everythign on Pandora are constructed to lure the humans in. A test of sorts, the sort that determines whether mankind should be eliminated.

It is in short, the worst scenario; it is the Dark Forest (a greater threat exists and that threat is what made Pandora).

I really like this concept. Now I am interested in watching the second film. The Dark Forest scenario is one I believe in strongly and I hadn't considered it with the first movie. Not sure if this is simply goin to turn out to be head cannon or not but it's an interesting enough idea and I will enjoy looking for the hints in both movies. I didn't dislike the first movie I just can't really remember it which is I think one of the problems being discussed about these movies. I also thing that too much time has passed between the first and second movie. But you have given me a reason to watch the new one. Thank you.

That is 99% fan theory with very little direct evidence on screen, although it does explain a lot.

The biggest memes I recall from the first movie were all from angry milSF fans: “glass canopies!” and “drop an asteroid on it”. Some elements of the 2nd film seem written to explain why Earth doesn’t want to nuke everything from orbit.

 Paint it Pink wrote:


By that I mean Dakka hosts people the majority of whom don't like Avatar.

I'm not sure that's fair. I'm pretty sure I remember enjoying watching the first one, but beyond some people being blue CGI and there being flying and sky islands, I can't remember anything about it. What I brought up was how it seems to have have no cultural impact despite being a well produced film that did well at the box office.

 Easy E wrote:
The biggest cultural impact is the name "Unobtainium".

I heard engineers jokingly use that term decades before Avatar came out and I'm pretty sure they didn't invent it. It was a bit odd hearing such a generic, laughable term in such a big film but then when looking at the rest of the Fergully 2.0 script it fits, I guess. Up there with "Somehow, Palpatine returned" in how much effort was put in.

 Easy E wrote:
The biggest cultural impact is the name "Unobtainium".

That term is way older than Avatar.

Herzlos wrote:

 Paint it Pink wrote:


By that I mean Dakka hosts people the majority of whom don't like Avatar.

I'm not sure that's fair. I'm pretty sure I remember enjoying watching the first one, but beyond some people being blue CGI and there being flying and sky islands, I can't remember anything about it. What I brought up was how it seems to have have no cultural impact despite being a well produced film that did well at the box office.

I don't dislike Avatar. I enjoyed the first one.

Never bothered seeing the second in theaters but sooner or later it'll be somewhere I can stream it and I'll watch it.

I think whether we like Avatar or not has little to do with the actual topic of the thread. We're not even the first people to ask it;

Reddit
Forbes
Some random website
Another random website

Literally from the moment Avatar 2 started approaching and even hitting theaters, people were talking about how weird it was that everyone went to see Avatar, that the movie was generally liked and successful, yet had no staying power on the popular imagination. Avatar 2 will probably be subject to the same discussions, as like Avatar 1 it was commercially successful, well regarded, but as well seems to be on track to have no lasting cultural impact despite its apparent success.

I’ve never understood the success of Avatar, it’s always struck me as average across the board with nice special effects. But the term “unobtanium” always bugged me and felt cheap, like it was a placeholder in the script and they were too lazy to come up with their own word.

It would be like literally calling the mcguffin in a film “mcguffin”, it’s just lazy.
May as well have Indiana Jones and the Mcguffin.

Herzlos wrote:
I'm not sure that's fair. I'm pretty sure I remember enjoying watching the first one, but beyond some people being blue CGI and there being flying and sky islands, I can't remember anything about it. What I brought up was how it seems to have have no cultural impact despite being a well produced film that did well at the box office.

The Matrix gave us red pill/blue pill. A million "What if I told you..." memes.

Even the Star Wars prequels gave us memorable lines - though not always in a good way (Anakin's thoughts on sand come to mind).

Edit: Beaten to it.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Aash wrote:
I’ve never understood the success of Avatar, it’s always struck me as average across the board with nice special effects. But the term “unobtanium” always bugged me and felt cheap, like it was a placeholder in the script and they were too lazy to come up with their own word.

It definitely seemed like an odd lazy name, but media is full of them. Mount Doom, Murderfang from planet Murder, etc.
It is a pretty bad example though because no-one would actually call a real material unobtainium, because if it was a real thing it wouldn't be unobtainable.

Sometimes people use a stupid name on the spot with the intent to come up with a better one later, but then you just get used to using the stupid name that it sticks. Like I doubt the metal’s Actual name is Unobtanium, but that it picked up that nickname from the guy’s trying to actually get their hands on it. Possibly also marketing, to help pump its value with PR of how hard it is to get.

They’re after a new resource in the second movie. One Even More valuable than Unobtanium, and Even More stupid and wasteful to acquire. I don’t remember if they mentioned a name/nickname for it, but it’s also more secondary to the main plot this time.

As for Dakka having different opinions than elsewhere… I was surprised how much Penny Arcade truly and utterly hates the Willow series after it was fairly well received here.

I get the point, but I would argue that Mount Doom from LOTR is not the result of lazy naming. It’s a deliberate choice that I think is appropriate for the idiom of the series. It has a name you know [/Michael Palin].

 LordofHats wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
The biggest cultural impact is the name "Unobtainium".

That term is way older than Avatar.

Perhaps, but I think it popularized it much further as I have heard it from a variety of sources now on a variety of subjects.

The Core did it better/worse and in much more flamboyant style that is a glorious disaster of a film

 Flinty wrote:
The Core did it better/worse and in much more flamboyant style that is a glorious disaster of a film

Hey now, I love that brilliantly stupid movie and have ever since I first saw it. It's a better disaster movie than it has any right to be, right up there with Geostorm (Now there's a movie nobody talks about despite Gerard Butler being in it).

I had to stop watching Geostorm. It was so poor

 Easy E wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
The biggest cultural impact is the name "Unobtainium".

That term is way older than Avatar.

Perhaps, but I think it popularized it much further as I have heard it from a variety of sources now on a variety of subjects.

Social media has made old memes spread as never before. "Mary Sue" is a great example.