Top 3 All-Time Gross: Will Anything Ever Beat Avatar?

So now that Star Wars has slowed down considerably. let's take a look:

- -Film- --- --Total-- -Dom- ----- --Inter-- ----- -Year--
1 Avatar Fox $2,788.0 $760.5 27.3% $2,027.5 72.7% 2009^
2 Titanic Par. $2,186.8 $658.7 30.1% $1,528.1 69.9% 1997^
3 SW:TFA BV $2,057.2 $931.2 45.3% $1,126.0 54.7% 2015

A few things to point out:

Three Vastly Different Films, the big sequel to the massively popular franchise, the out of the blue (pun intended) blockbuster, and the....period piece? Ha. SW might catch Titanic, it won't catch Avatar, there's no way. But look at that international difference...that is insane. Star Wars is nearly $200 million above #2 domestically, but missed out on larger international success, and Avatar was nearly an entire blockbuster film better than Titanic. That's insane, and let's not throw F7 in there, that's another discussion.

But we've been warned of a shift in film, as studios seek to chase profits, international is where real profits are at. Now, this was said by Spielberg years ago, right after Avatar. So the first question is, how the heck did Avatar do that internationally? The prediction was that as international markets matured movies would get dumber: More CGI, less obvious American actors, less words and a reliance on action/spectacle like sequences. Basically dropping the language barrier from being a problem. Was Avatar the perfect international film for that? Focusing on aliens, with their own language, that EVERYONE had to read?

We can also argue that movies are in fact, bigger, dumber, and less real, there's certainly a case to be made, but those predictions years ago told of all movies going that way. We haven't necessarily seen that to a complete overhaul of the film industry.

Not only that the domestic success of Star Wars is huge, because the true economic value of that property goes well beyond simple movie tickets, and that kind of domestic success, while not as simply put in terms of numbers, is much more controllable and probably valuable.