AVATAR vs. TITANIC Box-Office Comparison
According to various online sources, James Cameron‘s Avatar made $27 million at the domestic box office on Friday. (That figure includes the $3.5 million the 3D futuristic epic earned at midnight showings Thursday night.)
Sounds impressive? Well, it is. Cameron’s prior blockeviscerating epic, Titanic, made a mere $28.6 million on its opening weekend.
Sounds unimpressive for little Titanic? Well, think again. Ticket prices are now considerably higher than they were 12 years ago — $4.59 vs. $7.18 last year as per the National Association of Theater Owners. In other words, had Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet gone down with the ship (well, one of them did) late last year, Titanic‘s first-weekend take would have been $44.7 million. Add a few more millions to that number and you’ll get box-office figures to match late 2009′s higher ticket prices. Also, it’s worth noting that Avatar tickets are even costlier for IMAX and 3D screenings, where most of its box-office take has been generated.
Putting things into better perspective: Avatar‘s $27 million is nothing to sniff at, but thanks to Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart‘s on-screen chemistry, Chris Weitz‘s The Twilight Saga: New Moon grossed $72 million on its first Friday a few weeks ago. Not far behind, Michael Bay‘s special-effects-laden Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen made $62 million on its first Wednesday.
Even if you factor in that both New Moon and Revenge of the Fallen may have opened in more theaters than Avatar and had shorter running times, that’s still quite a discrepancy.
Another big discrepancy is the one between Avatar and its current competition. According to early estimates, no other movie made more than $3.4 million on Friday, which is what Disney’s The Princess and the Frog earned at the number two spot. Sandra Bullock‘s The Blind Side took in $3.1 million, the much-panned Hugh Grant-Sarah Jessica Parker comedy Did You Hear About the Morgans? debuted at fourth with $2.4 million, while Pattinson and Stewart (and Taylor Lautner) are still hanging in there, with The Twilight Saga: New Moon in fifth with $1.4 million.
Photo: Courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox
More information about: Avatar, box office, James Cameron, Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, Titanic, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
24 Responses to “AVATAR vs. TITANIC Box-Office Comparison”
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Has anyone seen that animated film DELGO? Avatar looks just like it. I watched both today and the similarities are amazing. I’m surprised nobody else has noticed. Maybe it’s because the DELGO film did so poorly in the box office. Who knows?
I haven’t seen either Avatar or Delgo yet… But has anyone seen Disney’s Atlantis??? The villian, character design with the natives, the environment, and the minor characters strongly parallel Avatar.
PLUS…Titanic stayed as the #1 movie in the country for over 3 months.
Titanic didn’t start off that successful, but word-of-mouth for weeks and weeks after its release is what made Titanic so successful.
Using the same math as you used for the tickets, Avatar cost less to make than Titanic.
I wonder why you didn’t think to mention that…
Hello,
I didn’t mention it because the piece was about box-office grosses, not film costs.
Also, it’s important to remember that movie-production-cost inflation is not the same as movie-ticket-price inflation. The two can’t be compared using the same ratio.
Cost figures I’ve found for “Titanic” are estimates, not official studio figures. The same goes for “Avatar.”
Some estimate that “Titanic” would have cost $250-$275 million in 2008/9 dollars. “Avatar” production cost estimates range from $200-$500 million. (Fox says it was about $200 million, but I haven’t seen any documentation on that posted anywhere online.)
And remember that neither estimate includes advertising/print/distribution costs.
I’ve seen it.
It’s amazing visually speaking but, I sort of had a hard time following the story.
I felt a bit overwhelmed with the incredible special effects and the visual aspects of this movie, that distracted me from following the storyline.
I mean, how many zillions of dollars Hollywood has to spend, in order to show off their technology, and high-tech resources?
It was entertaining but it didn’t make any impact on me, intellectually speaking.
Some stupid guy at my office told me: “If I want intellectual stuff I read a book, I don’t go to a movie”
“Yeah….here is some more popcorn” I thought to myself…
Boxofficemojo has just updated the Monday numbers, and thats the total worldwide. USD 285 Million! (93 domestic + 192 international)
I also noticed the MANY and striking similarities between Avatar and Disney’s Atlantis…..So strange that critics haven’t noticed it….
I was thinking that Cameron MUST’ve paid for the rights to Atlantis; I’m surprised there’s nothing else on the Web when I Googled it.
Now that you mention it, I also see the great similarity to DELGO!
Michelle,
I realize you wrote on this opening day. And you’re absolutely right that ticket prices are higher now, and that’s an advantage for Avatar. That said — do you have any further comment now — 12 days in? Avatar stands at 250m compared to 104m for Titanic after 12 days. Unlike virtually all megablockbusters which drop 40-50% in their second weekend, Avatar only dropped from 77m to 75.6m in its second weekend, and its second full week will be 10% or more ahead of its first full week — very ‘Titanic-like’ in terms of trends.
Michael,
Thanks for writing.
I’d say that AVATAR will be around for quite a while…
Now, the best way to compare the two films at this point would be to know how many tickets each of them sold. Also, it’s good to remember that TITANIC was initially shown in “only” 2,614 screens vs. 3,452 for AVATAR. That’s a huge difference. TITANIC’s widest release, according to Box Office Mojo, was in 3,265 screens.
Also, TITANIC has a 3hr15m running time, so it’s more than half an hour longer than AVATAR. Back in 1998, did that mean fewer screenings per day? That’s something else worth considering.
Check out:
http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=titanic.htm
http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=avatar.htm
Hi Michelle,
Thanks for writing back. Rather than get too longwinded here, I posted about our discussion at the link below. Briefly, I acknowledged the ticket price issue but made the point that we have to ‘do the math’ by considering not just the ticket price differential, but also inflation — and I ran the numbers which show that, adjusted for inflation and ticket prices, Avatar is at $250m thru 12 days and this compares to Titanic’s adjuted figure of $164m for the same 12 days (Titanic’s raw figure for 12 days is $104m). Anyway, this will be fun to watch.
Here’s the link:
http://avatarvstitanic.wordpress.com/2009/12/31/avatar-vs-titanic-debating-the-inflation-and-ticket-price-adjustment-issue/
avtar doesnt have power to break the record of titanic even if it breaks titanic best movie ever to be realeased in hollywood
i wil pray not the record should be breaken
Something else you should throw into the picture is that in today’s world people can just download movies instead of seeing them in theatres, so even if Avatar didn’t beat out box office numbers, I bet more people will see it in the first month than Titanic. Avatar>Titanic
The visuals and 3D were good for Avatar but that’s about it. Found it to be boring and predictable. The hype isn’t real. It’s good to see an article like this. Titanic is still far, far ahead in number of tickets sold as is Star Wars im pretty sure. I remember people going to see Titanic 5 times. It was a pain to watch Avatar once.
Rob….u may not have liked it — but to get a feel for the passion of some viewers u might want to check out some of the Avatar discussion boards. There are peeps that have seen it 8 times. It’s got a lot of the same trending as Titanic — just that Titanic got the repeat viewing from teen girls….this time it’s teen guys and geeks. There doesn’t seem much doubt that Avatar will surpass Titanic’s raw total of $600m (it’s $491m now and is probably going to pass Titanic before Valentine’s day and possibly as early as Feb 6th)….the question is could it possibly somehow get to $850m or whatever it would take to beat Titanic after adjusting for higher ticket prices? That would be an amazing accomplishment. And while it’s true that Avatar has higher ticket prices and that helps it — it also has the illegal download problem that didn’t exist when Titanic came out — over 1m illegal downloads and counting. How would 1m illegal downloads have affected Titanic’s gross?
I have a feeling that Avatar will be the first 3 Billion dollar film and will silence all those who talk about inflation. I think it might even be running in theatres one year from now. I saw it only in 2D (twice with family, and took a friend along for the second time), and want to see it in 3D. I will have to travel few thousand kilometres to see it in 3D and looking for an excuse to do it.
Lots of critics who crib about the lack of depth do not seem understand that this is a truly post modern film. The real movie is the audience experience derived by the interaction of the images with his/her past experiences including other movies, novels and cultural backgrounds. So it is truly remarkable that people of diverse background from India to Bolivia and China are deriving their own equally relevant meanings. The fact that it is slightly underwritten is its greatest strength (mostly likely deliberate by the wily and clever Cameron) so that it is open to such a wide variety of interpretations depending on what you want to read into it.
I myself felt like I had seen half a dozen parallel moves and more (the more you think the more different meanings you can feel) It has the same feel as Terminator or Star Wars or AI where you can keep seeing again and again and never get bored.
James Cameron understands something about movies that nit witted critics do not understand. It seems these critics want movies to be made for them. Cameron knows that it is important to make movies that a large number of audience from around the world can relate to.
The most amusing is the reactions of the americal right wingers who cannot go beyond seeing anti-americanism in everything.
This is a movie with global meaning.
I shall just mention the contexts for some diverse meaning below just for a single dimension of colonialism
a) East India Company and colonial exploitation in the making of the British Indian Empire
b) Displacement of tribals by Indian mining companies in the jungles of Orissa and Jharkhand, two Indian states
c) Human destruction of our planets environment
Colonization of Americas have been pointed out by every one.
Critics are upset that their story is not sufficiently portrayed in its “true” colours.
Alas, all these interpretations are both right and wrong and they are all valid depending on your perspective (ie who you are). It is the true greatness of Cameron’s genius that he has included just about enough for all of us to see what we want and has omitted any specifics which would leave prevent us from thinking all these parallel stories.
The Science Fiction genre allows the film maker sufficient freedon to be every thing an nothing at the same time to each one of us
As far as debates, and cribbing about the box office, let us wait for the story end (in 2011?)
I personally don’t like titanic, period end of statement. Avatar is just in my opinion so much better. titanic was just not for me, but then of course I didn’t like Fantastic Mr. Fox either.
I too did not find Titanic any special. (May be having been used to Indian films and the dislike it has created for melodrama)
Now a lot of Occidentals use Bollywood cinema to study “Indian culture” It is a curious case.
The only reality that the Hindi films reflect the imagined hyperreality of Bollywood movies themselves. Over the last decade, life has started imitating the movies (which reflect each other. In fact current ones are highly post modern and have references to earlier fims frame by frame especially in song sequences).
Even the “North Indian Wedding” has been changed by the imagined depiction of weddings in the movies. It is NOT the other way round. It is a case of movies invading life and not reverse.
Movies always refer to other movies and art forms.
There really are no original stories. Only degrees of originality and treatment.
It is how you tell an old story in a new way to make it attractive that counts. Or you can tell a new story the old way. New story in a new way, will not sell. That is what you get in “art films” or experimental films which you cannot get to see in a theatre even when we want to. (They dont even get released!)
So much for asking Cameron to tell a new story. They are asking him to pass through the “eye of the needle” with elephantine movie (It might be easier with a camel
IT IS VERY DIFFICULT FOR AVATAR TO BREAK THE RECORD OF TITANIC.
Hello americanos de pakotilla
vengo de un mundo q no os podeis imaginaaar xD
vengo de el mundo Avataaaaaaarrr!! muahahahaha
mi avatar se llama HJCUF4HCQN4C4NTUF
Ticket prices may be considerably higher now than they were 12 years ago, but ilegal movie downloading is also considerably higher now than it was 12 years ago.
so critics and tickets inflactioners, shoud consider that aswell.
Avatar is way better then Titanic no questions asked. Avatar had a much better storyline and a good ending aswell. Titanic everyone dies pretty much, AVatar lots people die aswell but less then titanic and their was more depth put into the ending
yes , but delgo was made in 2008 and avatar start filming in 2005 so ….