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No Impact: AVATAR’s Groundbreaking 3D Experience Is Why We Forgot About It

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James Cameron’s Avatar is no longer king of the domestic box office world. Star Wars: The Force Awakens took the top spot in North America officially on Wednesday, January 6, 2016. And with that record broken, we’ve been talking about Avatar more now than we ever have in years. It’s the biggest film of all-time worldwide with a stunning $2.7 billion in the bank, a figure that even the Star Wars juggernaut is unlikely to topple. Yet, we don’t make reference to it in everyday conversation. We don’t dress up like the characters every Halloween. We don’t think about it—ever. So how is it that Avatar, a film that made a half billion dollars more worldwide than Cameron’s equally blockbusting Titanic, is gone from most of our cinematic and cultural memories?

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5 X-FILES/BREAKING BAD Connections You May Have Missed

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Vince Gilligan may have created one of the greatest shows in TV history with Breaking Bad. But the writer/producer also spent time on various other televisions shows, the most well-known being The X-Files. Gilligan is credited with producing over 120 episodes of The X-Files, and he wrote some of the series’ most entertaining “Monster of the Week” hour-longs, with his multiple perspective vampire story “Bad Blood” often cited as his best.

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MAKING A MURDERER: An Engrossing, Overlong True Crime Saga

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When’s the last time you sat around for 10 hours watching phone call transcripts and courtroom video? Unless you had CourtTV during the O.J. Simpson trial, never is probably the answer. Well, Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi’s Netflix documentary series Making a Murderer might just change all that. The streaming TV service’s first foray into true crime film is engrossing and infuriating, in spite of runtime that’s more about binge watching than storytelling.

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STAR WARS, Nostalgia and the Delicate but Potent Franchise Relaunch

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Let’s get this out of the way first. I didn’t hate Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I loved certain moments. Disliked some others. And checked-out once or twice from utter disinterest. As far as big franchise resurrections go, J.J. Abrams’s return to that galaxy far, far away is about average. It checks all the nostalgia boxes, revisiting memorable lines and referencing classic moments. It moves at hyperspeed, sometimes to the point of illogic, as Abrams movies are wont to do. And most of the new central characters are more interesting than the old ones. I guess “not bad” is as far as I’m willing to go here. Star Wars: The Force Awakens… it’s not bad.

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JURASSIC WORLD Is Incredibly Stupid. Here’s Why It’s Hard To Care.

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Even by today’s big, dumb summer movie standards, Jurassic World is probably one of the stupidest movies you’ll ever see. The third sequel to Steven Spielberg’s dino spectacular is so braindead that I’d call it an exercise in blockbuster self-parody if I thought for one moment the movie was self-aware enough to go there. It’s not. Jurassic World is just dumb.

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