10 Movies That Are Actually Good Besides The Marketing Gimmick

When people express surprise that James Cameron's Avatar grossed $2.847 billion despite leaving "no cultural imprint," they clearly don't remember how cleverly the highly anticipated blockbuster was marketed.

Buzz around the film had been building for years, focused on the mystery of Cameron's new IP and the innovative technology he'd developed to bring his vision to life.

And of course, this was Cameron's first film since Titanic was released an entire 12 years earlier, which was enough to make it an easy sell to audiences.

Given that we live in an era where most huge movies are wildly over-exposed in their marketing, Avatar was a major breath of fresh air. The first official still wasn't released until around four months prior to release, and the first trailer a few days later.

The trailers ultimately didn't give all that much away either, focusing instead on the strange new world of Pandora, the eye-popping VFX, and Cameron's legacy of classic films.

FOMO was also heavily leaned into, marketing it as a must-see 3D event that everyone would be talking about - and that they certainly were, for a few months at least.

Yet as fashionable as it is to rag on Avatar today, it's still a mesmerising feat of cinema in a lot of ways, taking a simple, elemental story and encasing it within one of the most spectacular technological flexes Hollywood has ever seen.

If you genuinely think Avatar 2 is going to be a box office flop, be prepared to eat a healthy serving of crow.