Congratulations, Alex, you think just like George Lucas does.
colon, capital "d"


Well, it looks like Avatar is going to overtake Titanic's Worldwide gross. And it just made more money than The Dark Knight on the All-Time gross chart. I have a feeling it will make more money than Titanic soon on that chart too. Amazing. The film did $36 mil this weekend. It's still going strong. And if the distributor wasn't Fox, I'd be really happy for this film.

Not that it is paticularly important, but adjusted gross was discussed up thread, particularly the fact that Box Office Mojo's list has Gone with the Wind making $1.5 billion (domestic) in today's numbers.

Some people on the message board there did research in the primary documents and it all seems to suggest that the correct number would be around $750 million. The big problem seems to be that A) BoxOfficeMojo is using a ticket price of $0.23 from its initial run when sources (such as this Time magazine article) have people paying triple that for a matinee and more than $2 for premiere locations. And B) BOM has the movie grossing $168 million in all releases before 1989 when the real number from newspaper and magazine articles during these releases would seem to be maybe $80 million.

All of that results in Box Office Mojo assuming more than 200 million tickets sold when the number seems to actually be below 100 million. Still a very, very popular movie but not more than doubling modern contenders.

And of course, everyone is paying a premium to see Avatar, and that's why it's #1 by gross, any not necessarily by # of tickets sold. Are we going round in circles yet, thread-wise?

Finally saw Avatar this past weekend. Predicatable plot and flat as cardboard characters. That said, it was visually stunning and I really did enjoy being immersed in the CGI. I can see why it cost so much dough to make it, the animation was terrific. I only wish Cameron had spent more than $2.99 for the plot.

probably actually less. that premise has been around so long, its surely public domain by now. unless you mean the charge from Kinkos for script copying

Well, he probably got it on a Wal-Mart Rollback...... ;)

Has anyone worked on a major motion picture?

How hard is it to review the story during production? With everything shot out of order, effects (sound and visual) missing, can you really tell if the story is getting lost?

I've seen some of the dailies from the original Star Wars, If I'd seen those at the time, I'd have bet heavily the film was going to bomb. Yet that was a case were it all came together well.

On the other side, I'll bet the dailies from the Phantom Menace looked great if for no other reason that Jar-Jar was not in them yet....

I know Tom, our resident professional film editor, has talked about making story changes in the editing room.

And on a related note:

For Avatar James Cameron hired experts in set design, sound, lighting, animation, laser scanning, shading, and literally a thousand other disciplines.

So why does he think he can write? Is that any less of a professional discipline than a animator? Sure you can make the outline of a story but then bring in writers and screenwriters to flush it out.

I have no real problem with the plot. Yes, it is cookie cutter, but so are 95% of the loved big action movies and 85% of all movies. I thought it was a cookie cutter plot well presented.

Although, there's not really any objective indication that his writing negatively impacts the response to his movies. If the balance is off it certainly doesn't seem suppress the number of people who go to see the movie, and then see it again. Seems like a good example of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."