‘ Avengers Endgame ‘ has lastly taken over from ‘ Avatar ‘ as the bestselling film in the world. Sort of, not quite, though, why should you care, how come, what’s taken over from who and other such queries come down on your bad head to confuse you.
Luckily, I’m here to clarify. Simply put, it’s the following .
Avatar ‘ is a fairly ancient film produced in 2009, just around the fresh emergence of 3D cinema.
It was about a lot of people flying to another planet to exploit it from its natural resources. Only they discover it, as one does, already occupied by a “savage indigenous race.” It’s basically a historical allegory so far.
Human beings decide to take the stuff they want by force of war as they are, after all, human beings with space age technology. What have these natives got? Spears and arrows? What will they do with those except to lose the fight?
The fight ensues and natives are killed, and if memory serves me properly, the people take over and colonize the planet. They set up a government there and rule systematically to wipe out parts of the natives until they realize that it would be more cost-effective to let the remaining natives live and do the mining themselves, then export the valuable minerals to humans at a reduced cost, then they grant them “independence”.
Wait. My study department has just notified me that everything that occurred after the film finished. The natives put up a spirited fight in the film itself, led by a hero, a chosen one, a mighty savior of whom their ancient lore had spoken, a messiah, who would ride the flying dragon.
He leads the Indians against the people, somehow wins, kisses the girl and credits .
That’s ‘ Avatar.
No need to mention at this point that the ‘ Chosen One ‘ was a human being who infiltrated the native society and then took their champion’s mantle as if Patrice Lumumba were actually a blackface Liverpool miner, because that would lead to a whole can of worms exploding all over the page and we were already going through that. No, don’t be initiated. Those worms were let loose, they wriggled frenzied throughout the pages and pages of discussion, and they died of ancient age. Let’s just agree to disagree with something else, like Boris Johnson and how great a team he’s going to create with Trump and how ugly a woman Angela Merkel is.
Avatar was a huge hit, not merely because it so satisfyingly retold a reliably successful old story that always hits — from ‘ Pocahontas’ to ‘ The Last Samurai’ to that other film where the patriarchy was destroyed by a man in a dress— but also because it was— and this part is completely without controversy, it was amazing to look at
It was the first real 3D film experience worth the calories your optic nerves spent on it. It’s been fantastic. It was vivid and flamboyant, lush and epic and simply beautiful.
No wonder so many punters have watched it over and over again.
It became the world’s largest earning film and for years remained the world’s lowest earning film, Until the ‘ Avengers Endgame ‘ arrived.
Now, ‘ Avengers Endgame ‘ is a tricky, smart little monster. What the studio manufacturers did was spend 10 years creating other films, each of which was fairly much a trailer for the next, until you had years of trailers fueling appetites for this one grand finale.
‘ Avengers Endgame, ‘ a tale about how a lot of heroic and heroically driven individuals save the earth from an alien economist who thought that universal genocide would be a useful resource balancing instrument.
It was, and still is, a very famous film because all the buildup films were popular too. We were introduced to love the characters, the heroes, the anti-heroes, their banter, their interactions, their scenes of action, their individual internal struggles… all that caused us to watch it in our multitudes.
Thus was ‘Avengers Endgame’ positioned in a race against ‘Avatar’.
And the ‘ Avengers ‘ cash eventually overtook the ‘ Avatar ‘ cash with $2.79 billion in ticket revenues this weekend, moving past Avatar’s $2.789 billion.
Although inflation modifications are put into the image, ‘ Avatar ‘ is still in the lead, but then, well, ‘ Avatar ‘ taught us that if it looks like a victory, we’re celebrating it.
Never mind that in ‘ Avengers Infinity War ‘ Thanos wiped out half the Na’vi anyway.
