Avatar (2009)
The blue-people movie that broke the all-time box-office record and put 3D glasses on the entire planet. James Cameron waited a decade for the technology to match his vision — then spent a quarter-billion dollars proving it was worth the wait.
Avatar arrived in theaters on December 18, 2009, written and directed by James Cameron — a film he had been carrying since the 1990s, waiting for visual-effects technology to catch up to his imagination. The story was straightforward: in 2154, humans arrive on Pandora, a lush moon, to strip-mine its resources. Sam Worthington played Jake Sully, a paraplegic Marine who pilots a lab-grown Na'vi body — a towering, blue-skinned alien — and slowly switches sides. Zoe Saldana played Neytiri; Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang rounded out the cast. To shoot it, Cameron co-developed the Fusion 3D camera system with Vince Pace, on a budget of roughly $237 million.
It paid off completely. The film grossed $2.75 billion in its original theatrical run, and on January 25, 2010 it overtook Cameron's own Titanic to become the highest-grossing film of all time. It won 3 Academy Awards from 9 nominations. The cultural footprint in that winter was total: everyone saw it, everyone saw it in 3D, and the blue people were everywhere. Hollywood spent the next several years chasing the 3D boom Avatar ignited — the glasses, the surcharges, the retrofitted conversions.
Avengers: Endgame briefly took the box-office crown in 2019, but a 2021 re-release put Avatar back on top, where it remains — still the highest-grossing film ever released, with about $2.9 billion counting re-releases. The sequel, The Way of Water, finally arrived in 2022.
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