I feel like it’s appropriate to gloat a bit about the box office disappointment of Avatar: The Way of Water is seeing. I predicted this poor showing several weeks away from the release in December of 2022, and everything is happening just as I said it would. I like Jim Cameron, and I have been very supportive of Disney as a company over the years. But these people and companies have moved much more to the leftover political time and use their entertainment platforms to communicate radical left ideas. And Avatar is essentially a United Nations sustainable development advertisement that centerpieces a save the whales campaign. In the world we live in today, people are tired of having left-leaning messages crammed down their throats. And that is what this new Avatar film is, a massive environmental message about how primitive society is superior to a technological capitalist one, and people aren’t exactly flocking to see it. Now with the first Avatar, back in 2009, when people assumed that there were freedoms of choice and that the political left deserved a chance to be heard from after eight years of George W. Bush, the massive growth of government after 9/11, and the belief that liberalism and conservatism could all live well together, people were willing to give Avatar a chance. And because it was a visually spectacular film, they went to see it and listened to what James Cameron had to say about the benefits of worshipping nature.
This new Avatar film is doing good business from all normal measures. It is on track to break a billion dollars quickly with global box office numbers. Avatar is doing fantastic in countries where the United Nations is much more respected, such as Europe, and the greenie-weenie message is more accepted than in the United States. The liberal message with the fantastic visuals is worth seeing for people. But this film is now two weeks out and tracking with other blockbusters, and from the beginning, Disney was hoping this movie would be something special and that people would flock to see it like the previous movie. After all, Disney is committed to several more sequels of these Avatar films, and they think they will all make a few billion dollars each. Instead, what they are finding is a product with brand damage. In a post-Covid world, people are a lot more jaded about the liberal messages that are in movies. People watched their president being stolen from them. Instead, we were given by American intelligence agencies a loser in Joe Biden and told that all fossil fuels would be eliminated and we’d be forced to deal with power losses due to a lack of sustainability of solar and wind power. And the reason for Democrats is essentially the plot of Avatar 2. We have to save the whales. Capitalism is bad. And white people in big technical ships want to exploit indigenous people who live in harmony with nature. It’s the same argument against the formation of America and arguing that the Indians found in North America had their lives taken from them in favor of a greedy capitalist culture of technology lovers who are too into themselves and not bowing at the feet of mother universe.
Of course, the pin-heads at Disney believe that the World Economic Forum people in Davos are the future and have bought into it. Larry Fink’s BlackRock has bought up much of the board at Disney. Now their leadership is filled with purple haired transexuals who think the grooming of kids in kindergarten is appropriate. They wanted to go to war with Ron DeSantis in Florida to throw their weight around as a company, which would somehow work out fine on the public trust front. When the first Avatar film was made, it was produced by 20th Century Fox, but now that Disney has acquired that production company, Disney has the rights to Jim Cameron’s creations. And behind the scenes, they have been attached at the hip with their environmentalism messages. While Avatar doesn’t appear to have much going on with gay characters, the politics of the green movement is clearly the driving force. And people get enough of that on CNN, MSNBC, and all the newspapers these days. They are not inclined to spend money seeing a 3-hour movie about those topics. In days before the government showed all its ugliness with election fraud, FBI insurrections to throw a popularly picked president out of office, and all the evils government showed with Covid and the lockdowns, we are in a much different world than when the first Avatar film came out. Cameron has always flirted with liberal messages in his films, the Terminator films were cautionary tales of the evils of technology, and the Abyss was all about aliens who were warning us about our own tendencies toward destruction. But the old truck driver in Jim Cameron managed to speak a language of violence and independence that people could relate to. Hence, they overlooked the growing liberal in Cameron because his movies were good. After all, at the end of the Alien films, it was always the woman, Ripley, dressed in underwear, who representing Mother Earth would defeat the terror and save the quest. The message was always obvious in those films, the feminine aspect of nature would always save the day. But back then, Cameron and his fellow filmmakers were coyer about it.
But the success of Titanic, then Avatar went to Cameron’s head, and he has forgotten what made his movies great. Now he thinks he has the political capital to put very liberal messages in his movies, and people will love his movies so much that they might just learn something along the way. And that clearly is the belief of the Disney people who have drunk the Cameron Kool-aid. Where Cameron used to disguise his liberalism much better in the past, now he’s like the old man who farts at the table and just doesn’t care who might protest because everyone is hoping that they’ll get a nice present from that crazy old man at Christmas time, so they keep their mouths shut. And that Emperor Has No Clothes on mentality has hurt Jim Cameron. He has lost touch with his audience and thinks people like these blue people he created in Avatar are much beloved. But in truth, and this is the fact he hasn’t faced yet, it is because of technology, not the nature message, that people have gone to see Avatar at all. It’s all about the visual spectacle, not the message that people go to see, and this time around, people have seen it and done it. And liberalism is driving them away. It’s certainly not bringing them into the theaters. This isn’t Top Gun: Maverick which I would say is an average film from the 80s done now that people desperately crave a return to. People went to see Maverick because it made them feel good. Not because the movie was great but because they wanted to see that kind of patriotic story, even in places around the world separated from American influence. Avatar is the opposite; people go see it for the colors and the curiosity. But they forget the names of the characters after because they really don’t care about the people. Only the pretty scenery. And that gets them into the seats the first time, but we see that they go once and then forget about it. The film doesn’t have legs, and that is because of the grotesque liberalism contained in the story that has ultimately destroyed the Disney brand forever.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 