Avatar

Avatar is being billed must-see as the most expensive movie ever made.

As the actual production costs are not, for the genre, unusually excessive, it appears -- if the billing it to be believed -- that it is the marketing budget that broke records.

One wonders why with a film promising a revolutionarily magical viewing experience and fawningly reviewed by the best critics requires record-setting marketing.

Not all the buzz has been positive. Following South Park, many have derided the film as "Dances With Smurfs". The Independant sees the film as an "allegory of US adventurism in the Middle East". One conservative blogger crudely, labels the film "Liberal Porn of Doe-eyed nature lovers killing Marines," another simply questions "drawing the audience to cheer the brutal deaths of Americans."

Avatar's opening weekend -- hurt by an east coast snow storm -- appears to roughly track that of the awfully reviewed 2012, with relatively mediocre domestic revenue supplemented by strong performance overseas (where, presumably, fewer people have qualms cheering the brutal deaths of Americans).

The performance of Sherlock Holmes, which opens this friday, may provide a rough baseline to calculate how much 20th Century Fox and James Cameron cost themselves by injecting divisive politics into their blockbuster movie.