"Avatar:" Highest Grossing, Highest Diversity...Coincidence?

Coming in at #1 on the list of top 10 highest grossing movies since President Obama took office (and also #1 of all time) is "Avatar," the James Cameron directed movie from Fox studios.  Avatar grossed $2.782 billion in worldwide revenues, with a very impressive 72.7% coming from international sales  (boxofficemojo).  Cameron also has the #2 highest grossing movie of all time with the 1997 release of "Titanic" ($2.186 billion).

So what is Cameron's secret?  Both of these movies are based upon original material; both are of epic proportions; both are beautifully shot, transporting the audience to another time/place with extraordinary attention to detail; both feature unlikely love stories; and both have hugely climactic endings.  But does that explain it?  I think a better explanation is Cameron likes to examine our past.  With Titanic, we are captured by the grand scale of the ship and grand scale of its failure.  But we are also captured by class barriers and how love can overcome long odds.  With Avatar, Cameron creates a beautiful alien world (Pandora) to examine exploitive colonialism, reminiscent of Europe's conquests, but more particularly the U.S. war against, and displacement of, Native Americans during the times of "Manifest Destiny."  Cameron not only addresses class and racial barriers, he confronts species barriers.

Avatar has by far the most diverse cast of the Top 10.  A review of the cast list on IMDB shows PoC throughout the cast, with Zoe Saldana in the lead actress role.  While the invading Earthlings are white-dominant, Cameron used enough non-whites among the Earthlings to not make this a blatantly racial conflict.  This film is about greed and lack of respect for the lives and cultures of (apparently) weaker and less developed civilizations.

I'll conclude this blog series on Racism in Hollywood Blockbusters with the following observation: the top 10 movie with the most diverse cast is also the highest grossing movie of all time.  Hollywood can align the goals of profits and diversity by simply paying attention to results.