Bowling for Big Business…
Avatar Special Edition can be viewed as a Cameron gimmick to make more money from the film.

Divyadarshini Patel
New Delhi, August 30:

Avatar has hit it big again! This 3D epic from James Cameron has been re-released in a ‘Special Edition’ form with an extra nine minutes of previously unseen footage. It carries with it the same amount of adrenaline and I was happy to have seen it again on big screen though it might be a disappointment for some of them, who were expecting to catch more amazement from it. There might be many reasons to describe this as a pointless re-release but neither is this going to be our point of discussion nor is it going to be a movie review.

Two months after its first release, Avatar broke the records of Cameron’s own Titanic when it was officially declared as the biggest film ever. It looks like Titanic held on to the record for highest grossing movie long enough just to hand it over to Avatar. The movie stats are an outburst of excellence:

The earnings (sourced from Wikipedia) for the movie from the 1st release in December, 2009 are:

• The film earned $27 million on its opening day and $77 million over its opening weekend.
• IMAX ticket sales account for $228 million of its worldwide gross.
• It gained a worldwide gross estimated to $232,180,000 within the first week (the largest for a non-franchise, non-sequel and original film)

It had sold approximately 75 million tickets in North American theatres, more than any other film since 1999's Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Being the first ever -3D movie to be released worldwide, it had become a ‘must watch’ and this phenomenon contributed a lot to its gross earnings. The money earned was nothing but the mammoth success story of Avatar.

Seeing the income stats one would definitely wonder that why then, was this movie released just after 8 months of its worldwide opening in December 2009? It can be said that Cameron is out to beat Star Wars fame George Lucas.

Avatar’s co-producer, Jon Landau remarked, “We tried to look at what people have responded to in the film and give them more of that…There’s a whole new scene that takes place in the (Na’vi) school, there’s more night bioluminescence, there are new creatures, and there is a new action scene. The scenes don’t just feel like added scenes — they are very organic to the story and embellish it.”

This is indeed the introduction of a new financial strategy in the world of business. The movie was the first of its kind. Its release in 2009 was followed by the DVD release; and there would be a re-release of the DVD too, after the film’s re-release this month. The movie has an ardent fan following and this strategy has successfully emptied a good amount from their pockets! And it does not stop here; the producers are also planning a 3D DVD release in the coming year.