10 Mega-Successful Blockbusters Everyone Expected To Fail

4. Avatar

After becoming king of the world (cringe) with Titanic, James Cameron found himself with free reign to do whatever the hell he wanted with as much money as he wanted. And what did he do? Continue to feed his obsession with the deep ocean with a string of IMAX documentaries. Erm... OK? When he finally returned to feature filmmaking he decided to bring his long gestating passion project to life (ignoring that Titanic had been his long gestating passion project). A sci-fi epic with the blood of all his previous work running through its veins, it was on a scale never before touched on by the director and only willed into existence thanks to the increasing prominence of motion-capture; the original script, written in 1994 had been impractical at the time. On the one hand Avatar was exactly what audiences conventionally love - big sci-fi with action placed ahead of the genre's traditional meditations. But on the other, with an unknown lead and a heavy reliance on an alien culture, Avatar was a hard sell that faced a Waterworld-level battle to break through into profit. A battle it won spectacularly, sticking in cinemas right up until the DVD release. Although the bubble of total adoration of the film has long since popped, it's revered reputation still remains; the poster for Avatar boasted it was from the director of Titanic; the poster for the rerelease of Titanic a couple of years boasted it was from the director of Avatar.