10 Box Office Hits That Everybody Expected To Be Huge Flops

2. Avatar

Given James Cameron's consistent sucesses at the box office it's amazing that anyone ever doubts his ability to appeal to the masses, yet despite having been proven wrong by the success of Titanic, pundits and movie journalists demonstrated equal scepticism for the chances of Avatar being a success. You can see why they had cause to be sceptical - if Titanic's $200 million budget seemed bloated, Avatar's considerably larger price tag combined with its reliance on "new" technology (if an updated version of decades old 3D tech is really new) certainly made it a risky prospect. A development period lasting years only compounded the feeling of risk around the project. The public's enthusiasm for lapping up eye candy proved to be more than enough for Avatar to get away with embarassingly obvious elements such as calling the precious ore on Pandora (groan) unobtanium (groan again) - for the second time in his career, Cameron took a film predicted to flop and made it the highest grossing movie of all time.