Recently James Cameron indicated that he was going to write a book based on his blockbuster 3D flick, well, we have happened across the possible film sequel to the CGI-laden event.
Yeah, it starts out slow and a tad predictable, then turns disturbingly funny, so you know we totally liked it ourselves.
The Perfessor
Yeah, you read that right, the king of CGI SPFX is going to turn his latest blockbuster into a prose novel.
Cameron said he first considered writing the book when he was filming the movie. “I told myself, if it made money, I’d write a book,” the director said.
All of which simply begs the issue of how he plans on doing that. Well, we here at Cuppa have an idea or two in that regard...
Can you say Pop-up"?
Yeah, we have plenty of time on our hands too.
The Perfessor
P.S. Here is the list of his "source" material for the film (and one would guess) the book as well.
Yeah, that's what we thought too...
I was trying to make a joke here, but then I couldn’t actually think of what I needed to say to turn this into a joke. So I'm going to let it stand.
The Perfessor
Mark Twain once remarked that there were three kinds of lies, 1) Lies, 2) Damned Lies, and 3) Statistics. So whenever I hear someone (even myself) using numbers to prove their point I shudder a little. Case in point; the other day we pointed out that Avatar had passed Titanic as the biggest blockbuster of all times.
Only not so much.
Boxoffice is arguably more straightforward to report than TV ratings. You have this weekly Top 10 list of returns, you compare each movie to the other movies. TV ratings are a murky swamp where one network's hit is another network's flop and context is not just a factor, but often the entire story.
Yet one respect in which boxoffice reporting is pretty odd -- emphasizing ticket grosses yet rarely mentioning ticket sales. That would be like always reporting how many ad dollars sold off "Lost" and not mentioning the number of viewers that actually watched the show. With everybody reporting how "Avatar" is The Biggest Movie of All Time based on grosses ($1.859 billion and counting), it's important to remember how rising ticket prices skew the returns.
So, if we were to use actual tickets sold, it turns out that Avatar drops to #26. not bad, but still a ways off from the top slot.
The Perfessor
Well folks, last night it became official, Avatar became the highest-grossing film of all time, eclipsing the previous title-holder, Titanic, by a cool $15.4 million (worldwide; Titanic is still up by $45.8 domestically — but Avatar could potentially do that this weekend.
You can check out the rest of those numbers over at Box Office Mojo, but know this, that in adjusted dollars, the all-time champ is still Gone with the Wind.
The Perfessor
Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the movies, everyone wants to take a swipe at James Cameron. yeah, yeah he has produced a couple of the biggest and most beloved movies of all times (Titanic, and Aliens), and has debuted Avatar this year which immediately shot to the top of the charts, but, well, it seems that everyone wants to dethrone the king of the world.
First, you get folks knocking the simplistic nature of the story itself (saying that it is simply fancy CGI laid over an old story) then you have, well nothing short of the Vatican itself calling it “bland”
The
...official Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano gave it the thumbs down in a review which, among other things, faulted Cameron's storytelling as "bland.""By concentrating on the creation of Pandora's fantasy world he tells the story without any deeper exploration," the Vatican paper said.
L'Osservatore also lamented that "there is plenty of stupefying, enchanting technology, but few genuine human emotions."
Talk about harsh.
Still, while we certainly love comparing divergent movies to find similarities, even we were hysterical when we read this:
Yep, it’s tough to be the King
The Perfessor