Avatar breaks $1bn mark and gives Hollywood hope

With economists predicting a decade of slow economic growth in developed economies, the search for the next big economic engine is underway with many predicting green-energy technology could fuel growth as internet technology did through the late 90s and early 00s. But James Cameron, the Hollywood movie director, appears to have found his own money machine.

Over the weekend, Cameron's science-fiction epic Avatar shot past the $1 billion box office marker in worldwide sales, only the fifth movie ever to do so.

Avatar is Cameron's second film to cross the $1 billion barrier (the first being Titanic which went on to take $1.8 billion) and a major triumph for Rupert Murdoch's 20th Century Fox, the studio that bankrolled the virtually movie star-less project.

About 75 per cent of the Avatar box office take has come from cinemas showing it in digital 3D presentation - at a premium over traditional 2D showings - and has proved to Hollywood that customers are prepared to pay more for the new technological experience.

"Here's what's happening: I think everybody has to see Avatar once," said Fox executive Bert Livingston. "Even people who don't normally go to the movies, they've heard about it and are saying, 'I have to see it.' Then there's those people seeing it multiple times.''

Cameron is the only filmmaker to have made two films to cross the billion marker (the three other $1bn breakers are The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and The Dark Knight). If Avatar takes another $140 million - which it almost certainly will - it will surpass Lord of the Rings to become the most successful film of all time.

Cameron took more than 10 years to complete the film, with the majority of its total $425 million budget (if you include promotion) going on special effects. The film industry now hopes its success will usher in a new era of movie-making for a business that has lately been suffering from declining numbers of cinema-goers as well as declining sales of DVDs.

Film critics say Avatar has returned a sense of social experience to film-going. "After a decade when watching movies became an increasingly solitary affair, something between you and your laptop," noted the New York Times, "Avatar affirms the deep pleasures of the communal, and it does so by exploiting a technology (3D), which appears to invite you into the movie even as it also forces you to remain attentively in your seat."

Now, the great movie makers are rushing to work in the 3D medium, including Steven Spielberg, who is making Tintin, and Tim Burton, who is completing Alice in Wonderland. So whilst economists worry about sovereign defaults, stimulus exit strategies, slow growth and asset-price corrections, Cameron has proved the economics of giving consumers the fantasy of blue aliens on faraway moons.

"Leave it to James Cameron to do this," Paul Dergarabedian, box-office analyst for Hollywood.com, told the Associated Press. "To not only set the technical world on fire, the visual world on fire, but also the box-office world on fire 12 years after Titanic." ·