Top-Grossing Avatar Puts Murdoch in Unfamiliar Position

Avatar is putting Rupert Murdoch's also-ran movie studio in an unfamiliar position: at the top.

In this young year, News Corp.'s 20th Century Fox is the top-grossing movie studio as Avatar just became the biggest box-office film of all time.

Fox has been a perennial No. 4, 5, or even 6 for most of the past decade, according to the blog Box Office Mojo. The studio hasn't had a top-grossing movie of the year since 1999: Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. That movie made $924 million.

With more than $1.8 billion in sales, James Cameron's animated movie Avatar passed Titanic (also a Cameron movie put out by Fox and Viacom Inc.'s Paramount in 1997).

Fox had a nice run in the second half of the '90s (Independence Day was the top movie of 1996), but Time Warner Inc. and Walt Disney Co. have dominated in recent years.

"Part of the reason Fox has fallen is because they haven't exactly aimed for the top," says Brandon Gray, publisher of Box Office Mojo. "They've made a lot of middling movies." (He cites The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Rocker.)

Avatar is the most expensive movie Fox ever made (some estimates put it as much $500 million). Gray says don't expect Fox to start spending like crazy. It's not the studio's culture. But do expect a sequel, he says.

And despite its success, the movie is infuriating some conservatives who reject its liberal bent and condemnation of imperialism. That irony is not lost on some commentators, given the right-wing (some would say imperialist) views of another wing of News Corp. (yes, Fox News, we're talking about you).