A major source of excitement in the movie world is the box office race between Marvel’s Avengers Endgame and James Cameron’s Avatar. While Endgame has broken many box office records including highest grossing film in an opening weekend being the first film to reach $1 billion that fast, it is still tiptoeing to surpass Avatar in highest-grossing film. With Endgame sitting at around $2.62 billion and Avatar at $2.78 it would seem that Endgame would surpass the other quickly with how fast it rose in box office. However, many others are claiming the movie will level out and never reach the top as it seems.
With Avatar having held this position at the top since 2009, it has become a cultural phenomenon of the movie world to watch as Endgame may overtake it. With a culminating movie coming out of ten years of an underdog film company that came from nowhere it is impressive to look back and see how far Endgame has come. However, thinking critically about the two films does Endgame deserve to take the top spot?
Source: abc.net.au
While Endgame was a culminating ending to one of the biggest franchises at this time, Avatar in itself was and still is a masterpiece of cinema. Between world building, plot and dialogue, and overall visual effects of this insane world James Cameron created, the film is unmatched. The thing that diverges the two I think is Endgame has an insanely large fanbase to back it up as well as the hype of it being the ending of an era. These two things combined with the “no spoil” marketing has created a win situation for Marvel as so many flooded the theaters to see the ending of a saga of films with beloved characters and to avoid spoilers. Avatar achieved the numbers without the loyalty of fans to certain characters and without the hype of an ending film.
Source: Polygon
So is Endgame as deserving of the top spot? To me I don’t think so. I’m the biggest Marvel fan I know, but I also know that Endgame wasn’t a cinematic masterpiece. Was it still an amazing movie? Yes! Definitely, I saw it twice! Marvel has still done things no other company or series of movies has ever done and that is weave a huge storyline over 23 different movies which is unprecedented. Was the movie still visually beautiful? Yes, definitely! Was it narratively sound? That is where I have confused opinions and so do others. As many including me feel that there was a lot of crowd pleasing done as well as bringing time into the mix without explaining and following through as well as they should have.
Either way you see it, this is still an amazing time for cinema and watching Endgame possibly surpass Avatar is still something very exciting!