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If you grew up in the 90s like me, you probably saw the Best Picture-winning film Dances with Wolves roughly 300 times over the course of your childhood. Why? Because whenever one of the mediocre cable channels had four hours of airtime to kill, they went right ahead and spun up Kevin Costner learning all about life on the prairie from its native Lakota inhabitants. Then your dad uttered something like, “Oh, that’s a good western,” and wrested the remote control from your hands. You were pretty much committed for the rest of the evening at that point.
You know, after a while, Dances with Wolves actually started to grow on me. Sure, it’s gotten some criticism from a tiny minority of the cripplingly ultra-woke over the years (who can’t really enjoy anything), and conversely also from a tiny minority of the neoconservatives (who can’t really enjoy anything except a tiki torch rally). And Dances with Wolves caused us all to have to listen to far too many screeds about how Goodfellas should have won the Best Picture Oscar that year instead. But overall, if you ask me at least, Dances with Wolves started out as a pretty good movie and held up fairly well over time. Like that scene where Wind In His Hair tastes processed sugar for the first time and then just unceremoniously dumps a whole fistful into Kicking Bird’s coffee? Classic.
Dances with Wolves definitely didn’t need a remake, and it didn’t get one, at least not one that was credited. But in 2009, James Cameron decided to rip off the entire plot and storyline of Dances with Wolves, set it in space, take out all the character development and anything even remotely resembling cogent dialogue, and then put a mantis shrimp in charge of cinematography.
Proving once and for all that you don’t have to be good to make money, the resulting abomination called Avatar became the highest-grossing film of all time, and held onto the record for nearly 10 years.
Avatar’s global box office gross topped out at $2,789,700,000.
I still vividly remember walking out of that theater in 2009, the way people remember where they were on days of great national tragedies. My friends and my degenerate cousin all mystifyingly seemed to somehow have avoided the shellshock I was suffering, despite having just endured the same three-hour neon train wreck that I did. Was this what it was like to see the culture you thought you knew and loved slip away through your fingers? I was midway through law school, and for the first time found myself questioning my career path. Maybe the laws of a society that would elevate to the very top of its most popular art form a film in which the main character literally says, “Let’s dance,” right before the fight scene really weren’t worth spending a career fighting for.
For nearly a decade, no other movie even came close to erasing the lightning bug stain on the windshield of cinematic history that is Avatar. But then, finally — FINALLY — after years of building up the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Disney and Marvel Studios released Avengers: Endgame in 2019. And it was… good. Not great, but, you know, good enough. The characters weren’t all two-dimensional stereotypes. People occasionally did and said funny things. Where it was hackneyed, it was supposed to be hackneyed. Maybe best of all — spoiler alert if you’re one of the three people who haven’t seen it yet — it (kind of) got rid of Hawkeye for us.
The most heroic thing the Avengers did though is finally snatch the crown for top-grossing movie of all time from Avatar’s empty, elf-eared dome. As of last Sunday, 13 weeks after its release, Avengers: Endgame’s worldwide box office gross topped $2,790,000,000, edging out Avatar for the top spot.
I know that is not accounting for inflation and there are all kinds of other reasons you could argue that Avatar actually made more money, but shhhhhh… just let us have a moment to enjoy living in a world where Dances with Wolves in Space isn’t the highest grossing film of all time anymore. Ah, exquisite.
Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.