So… Does ‘Avatar’ Have A Lasting Cultural Footprint?

By the time you read this article, Avatar: Fire and Ash will have taken in $1 billion at the global box office. This makes it the only film series ever created with three consecutive billion-dollar hits, and James Cameron the only filmmaker in history to have directed four billion-dollar hits. Consecutively. Which means, not unjustifiably, fans of this franchise can wholeheartedly mock anyone who claimed that these movies “have no cultural footprint.”

Including me, to be clear:

And then you have Avatar, which upon re-release overtook Avengers: Endgame as the highest-grossing movie of all time and it has zero cultural footprint. Can anyone recite an iconic line from that movie? Do they remember the stakes of the final battle? Ask someone on the street what the name of the main villain from that movie was. Do you think they could tell you without looking it up? Does anyone remember that Avatar even had a pop love ballad song attached to it?! But here is the weird part — thirteen years after that movie smashed box office records and retained no lasting presence in pop culture, a belated sequel called Avatar: The Way of Water was released and also became a smash hit at the box office and also disappeared from the public consciousness soon after it left theaters!

How can I possibly look at a franchise achieving this level of consistent financial success over a span of sixteen years and stand by that? But then again… I just cannot shake the feeling that these Avatar movies still lack any kind of real cultural impact even now. But why? It’s not my bias against the movies clouding my judgment; I’ve been an outspoken critic of Joker for years but its status as a cultural and political phenomenon is indisputable. The Star Wars prequels also had risible dialogue and flat characters, but have, against all odds, endured in pop culture twenty years after the last installment left theaters. You may hate Jar Jar Binks… but you still remember him, don’t you? Quick, who was the goofy comic relief character from the first Avatar? Can you do an impersonation of that character right now? See what I mean? How come this just does not happen with these movies?

I certainly don’t want to do the Pauline Kael thing of claiming that because I personally don’t know anyone who recognizes Avatar references, it must not be very culturally relevant. I am well aware that I am getting older and more out-of-touch with “popcorn blockbusters,” which I was reminded of in a profound way when I watched KPop Demon Hunters, a movie seemingly created in a lab as a platonic ideal of something that is Not For Me™. But that’s okay! If kids these days are singing along with “Golden” and “How It’s Done” so often that it’s driving their parents crazy, I can’t pretend the movie didn’t leave a massive mark on our pop culture. Girls dressed up as those characters for Halloween, people who had never encountered K-pop before suddenly had to have an opinion on the film, and it set a record for the most-watched Netflix title in the history of the platform. Were those 500 million views all unique viewers? Not at all! But those repeat viewers, I think, could lend an explanation for Avatar’s relative lack of cultural staying power despite making so much bank.

One of the things I’ve become more committed to as a film writer is reminding younger readers of how things they take for granted in our entertainment landscape these days were not always the norm. Before the advent of VHS in the late 1970s, it was very difficult to rewatch your favorite movies and TV shows. They ran in theaters during a limited window of time (though far longer than the theatrical release schedules we have now) or aired during a specific time slot and if you missed it, that was it. If it wasn’t set to re-air or re-release any time soon, you were out of luck. Being able to watch your favorite movies on your own device whenever you wanted was a massive shift in our entertainment media diets. Blade Runner was a box office bomb that found new life and enduring cultural impact thanks to home video releases. Meanwhile, Three Men and a Baby was one of the biggest box office hits of the 1980s and pretty much no one remembers it these days because it did not maintain that popularity when it hit home video. In the last nearly-fifty years, it’s just not enough for a lot of people to watch your movie in theaters. People have to want to watch it over and over at home, keeping those indelible moments and lines fresh in the memory long after they leave theaters, and I think the Avatar movies struggle with this to a degree other popular movies don’t.

Whenever I see someone defend these movies as cinematic masterpieces, one of the first things they do is describe their scale. These are films that slam you with state-of-the-art spectacle and overwhelming scope that simply must be experienced on a big screen. And they are, admittedly, correct. But Avatar, more than other Big Theatrical Events like Barbenheimer, tip into being movies that can only be truly experienced on a big screen. Rewatching the previous two movies in preparation for Fire and Ash really made it apparent to me just how much they depend on the big screen overwhelming your senses. Because when one of them is experienced on a regular-sized screen, all the annoyances with the story and characters and racial condescension that one could maybe brush off before suddenly become much bigger annoyances. So you have a franchise where the hype surrounding it as a unique theatrical experience set the conditions for singularly huge numbers of people watching each new installment in theaters… but only in theaters. With very few of those attendees having much interest in experiencing them a second or third or fourth time in any other format.

I try to type “I was wrong. These movies are not just technological achievements. They are significant cultural touchstones. Never bet against Big Jim,” and I just can’t bring myself to do it. But I also no longer want to advance the notion that these movies “have no cultural footprint at all” since this is one of the only film franchises in existence today unabashedly staking out a position in favor of movie theaters as irreplicable cinematic venues. If most (not all; don’t freak out if you’re one of the exceptions) consumers aren’t interested in revisiting the Avatar movies outside of theatrical release windows, that means consumers are still going out and paying for the privilege of seeing them in theaters. This franchise is one of the last soldiers on the last battlefield in the war for theaters, bravely standing firm against the tech industry Visigoths.

In an era when Netflix and other streaming services are trying to kill off the relevance of movie theaters and usher in a world where people are all just half-watching new film releases on a computer screen while doomscrolling on their phones, maybe that kind of cultural impact is a substantial one we should all recognize, even if everything else about their stories and characters are otherwise forgettable.