(Credits: Far Out)
Wed 11 June 2025 9:30, UK
It’s no secret that original stories perform very badly at the box office. Repurpose an old comic book character whose story arc already came to a close on film a decade ago, and you’re likely to have a sure-fire hit. Even Oscar-winning movies are often just recycled material. Since 2015, only four ‘Best Picture’ winners—The Shape of Water, Parasite, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Anora—have been original intellectual property (IP).
All of this is pretty depressing for those of us who tend to list original movies as their favourites. Directors like David Lynch, Celine Song, Ari Aster, and Quentin Tarantino are few and far between, even though they have all proven in very different ways that originality yields some of the greatest films ever made. There is nothing wrong with movies that are based on true stories or previously created works of fiction, but there is something particularly magical and transportive about watching a plot unfold without a shred of knowledge about where it might go.
Sadly, that is not the general consensus. Most moviegoers want to know exactly what they’re going to get. Every single one of the 50 highest-grossing movies of all time has been based either on true events or established IP. The Star Wars sequels, all those indistinguishable Marvel movies, Disney’s shenanigans: all of it is rehashing old territory.
You have to go all the way down to 52nd place to find an original idea, and it’s a bit of a dismal one. Zootopia is the highest-grossing film based on an original story. It’s no masterpiece, but the under-fives went crazy for it, so who are we adults to judge? Directed by Byron Howard and Rich Moore, it imagines a utopian world populated by talking animals in which a rookie cop (of the rabbit persuasion) teams up with a cynical fox to save their city from a conspiracy.
It did gangbusters at the box office when it was released in 2016, raking in $1billion at the worldwide box office and putting Inception’s $827million to shame. Interestingly, despite this blowout showing, Disney has dragged its feet about doing a sequel. Supposedly, Zootopia 2 is set for release later this year, but the original’s core fanbase has likely aged up to Marvel and Minecraft by now.
What about ‘Avatar’?
The big blue elephant in the room is that James Cameron’s Avatar is often cited as the highest-grossing original film of all time. It is also the highest-grossing film of all time, full stop. Released in 2009, it raked in a whopping $2.9billion thanks to its much-hyped special effects.
Cameron poured his heart, soul, and fortune into making the film. He started writing it way back in 1994, but put it on hold to make Titanic. Once that box office juggernaut was out of the way, he emerged from the Oscar fog to discover that CGI still hadn’t advanced enough to do justice to his imagination. Finally, by the mid-2000s, he felt that things had progressed enough and set the cogs in motion.
Set on the fictional planet of Pandora, Avatar follows the struggle of the local blue-skinned tribe, the Na’vi, against the expansion of a human mining colony seeking to obtain the valuable substance known as unobtanium. Its connections to environmentalism and the stories of Indigenous people all over the world are pretty blunt, but there are other reasons why the film really can’t be considered original.
On one level, the movie is Dances with Wolves set in Alpha Centauri, in which Sam Worthington plays Kevin Costner’s character. No one involved in the 1990 western sought credit, but plenty of other artists, most of whom had either written science fiction or created visual artwork that looked an awful lot like what Cameron produced, brought about plagiarism lawsuits against the Titanic director. The 1992 animated film FernGully: The Last Rainforest is the most obvious comparison, but there are dozens of others. In short, Avatar is a mixtape of other art and narratives, and calling it original would do a disservice to all the creators who came up with its many elements before it.
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