The real cultural impact of ‘Avatar’, according to science
This might seem like a dumb, obvious statement to make, but in order for a film to make a lot of money, a lot of people have to see it.
When a lot of people see the same movie, it seeps into popular culture, and we can see this in the way some of the highest-grossing films ever have affected the way we speak, because have you ever been at the front of a boat and not wanted to shout “I’m king of the world!”, à la Jack Dawson in Titanic, or talked about “phoning home” while imitating ET the Extra-Terrestrial, and then there’s the curious case of Avatar, the invisible billion-dollar movie.
Everyone was talking about James Cameron’s big blue passion project in 2009, but it has had little to no cultural impact in the years since. Nobody ever talks about feeling very Na’vi, and the film’s motto, “I see you”, gained zero traction, and could you honestly tell me anything about the main character, Jake Sully, other than that he was in a wheelchair? Most people still have to make it clear whether they’re talking about this film or the animated TV show Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Even with the release of its two subsequent sequels – The Way of Water and Fire and Ash – the series hasn’t gained a foothold in the media landscape, and yet, people continue to go and see them, because the first two films are among the highest-grossing in history, having drawn in over $2billion each, so is Avatar a cultural sensation or not? To answer that question, we must turn to our old friend science.
In an article for Stat Significant called ‘Does ‘Avatar’ Have No Cultural Footprint? A Statistical Analysis’, journalist Daniel Parris used a number of metrics to get to the bottom of this issue, and one thing he explored was Google searches, and using a tool called Glimpse, he discovered that Avatar racked up an average of 1.3million searches per month in the decade since its release. By comparison, The Dark Knight only received 540,000 searches. The only blockbuster that scored higher was Twilight.
Things look a little bleaker when you compare the series’ hardcore fanbase to some of the heavyweights. A separate graph shows that Avatar has just 2,100 pages on the fan-curated encyclopedia website Fandom. That’s less than Planet of the Apes, which is a much smaller franchise in terms of box office gross. Star Wars, which Avatar could have rivalled, has almost 200,000 pages.
The article goes into even more detail than this and is definitely worth a read, and all these facts and figures seem to point to one conclusion, because while Avatar remains a hot topic among the general public, it hasn’t established a passionate fanbase in the way that other franchises have.
This explains why you never see any of its merch anywhere, and in an era where everything is commodified, when have you ever seen anyone wearing an Avatar hoodie?
Sadly, it seems like things are only going to get worse because the response to Fire and Ash has been lukewarm at best, and with two more sequels on the way, it’ll be interesting to see if the franchise can finally establish a presence or if it will sink even further into damn-near obscurity.
