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The most shocking aspect of Avatar is the third record, though. Not including the yet to be released Alice in Wonderland and Toy Story 3, only four previous movies had earned at least a billion dollars worldwide. The aforementioned The Dark Knight barely managed this amazing feat with $1.01 billion. The other non-James Cameron feature films that pulled it off are The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. The reigning champion in this category, as in the case of domestic box office, had been Titanic with its staggering $1.8 billion total, a full $700 million beyond what any previous title had managed.

Keeping that in mind, the way that Avatar has raised the bar for worldwide box office redefines the industry. Only 27% of the overall box office for the movie was accumulated domestically, a North American run we just evaluated above. Almost three fourths of what Avatar earned worldwide was accrued abroad as $2.02 billion worth of international consumers wanted to see what the fuss was about. Note that the international box office alone for Avatar exceeds the overall box office performance of Titanic, the previous record holder, by roughly $200 million. Combining the thought processes, the international take of Avatar is so significant that it exceeds the overall global take of any non-James Cameron project by over a billion dollars. And that amount in and of itself had only been accomplished by four movies in the history of the industry prior to the release of Avatar.

Avatar is huge.

You knew this, we knew this and it almost goes without saying. Still, when we evaluate the distinguished Film Industry Stories of 2010, we would be remiss to ignore what was accomplished here. Avatar is above and beyond other titles that are in and of themselves above and beyond the rest. This is like hitting 100 home runs in a single baseball season or scoring 20 touchdowns in a game or scoring 100 points in a half. It shouldn’t be possible yet it is.

Oddly, the only negative against Avatar during its entire theatrical release was something entirely out of its control. Despite garnering nine Academy Awards nominations, Avatar’s presence at the Oscars was largely reduced to an afterthought. Its three victories were in Art Direction, Visual Effects (why did they even need to vote?) and Cinematography. Despite everything James Cameron did to enable the duplicated triumph of Titanic and even exceed it, he was not voted Best Director. Instead, that honorific was bestowed upon Cameron’s ex-wife, Kathryn Bigelow.

Bigelow’s movie, The Hurt Locker, was also selected Best Picture over Avatar. While I will not argue the relative quality of both movies, each of which is exceptional in its own right, here is the statistic that is germane to the discussion at hand. The Hurt Locker earned $17.0 million domestically and just under $50 million worldwide. The difference between the box office champion of 2009 and the Academy Award winner for Best Picture that year is $743.5 million, an amount that in and of itself is over $40 million more than any movie other than Avatar has ever accumulated. In terms of global receipts, the gap between The Hurt Locker and Avatar is $2.733 billion. Stating the obvious, there will never again be a gap like this between Best Picture contenders.

I cannot shake the feeling that professional jealousy toward James Cameron caused voters to choose the upstart. Had any popular director in the industry accomplished such a revolutionary box office feat, they would have been rewarded with a victory lap at the Academy Awards. James Cameron will have to console himself with the several islands he can buy with his Avatar money…and the money he will receive from the pair of Avatar sequels he is planning to create.

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