With Avatar opening in a month, many Hollywood analysts and journalists are preparing and publishing stories that focus on the bloated budget, the troubled history of 3D movies, and the likelihood that Avatar has the potential to be the biggest bomb in cinema history. Now, all of this sounds very familiar, as I heard and read all these stories when the subject was instead Titanic, which proved itself the most successful movie ever made.
Having seen the exclusive 15-minute 3D preview several months ago, I can safely say that whatever experience you’ve had with 3D in the past has no bearing on what you are about to witness on the big-screen. Judging the visual quality of the movie based on 2D trailers is futile.
Related: My 16-Minutes of Avatar: Did Cameron Deliver or Crash and Burn?
Now we have Kim Masters of The Daily Beast droning on about Hollywood concerns, going the extra mile to say that because Robert Zemeckis’ latest 3D movie, A Christmas Carol, tanked at the box office that there is great cause for concern when it comes to Avatar. How these two movies relate is beyond me. The only thing they have in common is “3D” and even there they use two completely different processes. That, and very few people give a crap about Charles Dickens or A Christmas Carol, or Robert Zemeckis’ sloppy version of a classic tale.
Still, she describes Avatar as “iffy.” And that may not be the adjective that executives at Fox and their partners on the film want to hear. Given that it’s taken 12 years for Cameron to produce a follow up to Titanic, and considering the immense cost of the technology, the industry and the media have been guessing at Avatar’s budget, with the Los Angeles Times recently putting it at $310 million with additional marketing costs of about $150 million. Other estimates are even higher. (Fox co-chairman Jim Gianopulos told Reuters earlier this week that rumors the movie will cost $500 million are “ridiculous,” acknowledging nonetheless that it was “quite expensive.”)
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