What Do the Box Office Revenues of Films Like Avatar Show Us?

Avatar is not a film that offers people something different in the world of cinema. Nor is it a film that blows your mind. However, the box office revenue it has earned tends to suggest that the film really does promise something. Because why would people consume things that don't mean much, why would they demand them? What was different about Avatar, what kind of main idea and subtext did it have? Was Avatar a film far from clichés? Because the world tells us that this film is definitely not a bad film, on the contrary, by filling movie theaters it shows it's a good film. But that's not the case.

Avatar, and films like it, are the clowns of cinema. Avatar and those like it, especially the superhero and comic book films that began in the early 2010s, are also the clowns of cinema. Cinema is an art form. It is a branch that has an introduction, development, and conclusion, that has things the director, screenwriter, or producer wants to tell. For example, the film Schindler's List is one of the peaks of cinematic drama. Scarface is a story. It is a fiction, a meaningful cause-and-effect relationship. A character like Tony Montana wanting at first sight a woman who seems hard to attain, who is seen as "the boss's woman," and obtaining that woman, even if with difficulty.

Avatar, Titanic, Spiderman, Superman. These are the stage where the art of cinema passes into being finished by human hands. The films that have made the most box office in the world are generally both lowbrow films. They are works that are easy to understand, digest, and consume. For instance, a series like The Wire is the final stop of the world of series and is the boss monster placed before an audience accustomed to consuming what is easy. Its film version is The Godfather.

That is why Avatar and similar films breaking box office records, yet films on which cinema lovers of the world agree failing to enter even the top 10 highest-grossing, leaving Avatar aside, is related to the scarcity of people in the world who understand quality.

For example, how possible is it for a person who watches Çukur, a Turkish series, to like a film like Pulp Fiction, which is a peak of absurd comedy and also carries an aesthetic dimension? I make this determination both intellectually, through analysis. And also, as far as I can see, for example, I think that people who watch Turkish series would not watch a magnificent first season like that of Prison Break.

In the end, popular culture is mostly mediocre, sometimes below mediocre, and what determines this is the simplicity of what people we can call simple demand.