Stephen McGinty: Highs and lows of being immersed in the world of cinema

I DO like Rupert Murdoch. He's a newspaperman, a great James Bond villain, and who could fail to find a little affection for a 78-year-old billionaire who prefers to dye his own hair, struggling over the sink with plastic gloves and fiddly bottles rather than admit to what the world already knows: that his hair is not naturally a strange orange tint?

Then there is his comment upon first viewing James Cameron's Titanic, the film his studio, 20th Century Fox, had spent $200 million on, and which later earned $1.8 billion at the box-office and an astounding 11 Oscars. As the lights went up in the studio's private screening round he turned to Bill Mechanic, the head of the studio, and said: "Pretty good, but it's no Air Force One."

Anyone who has seen Air Force One, in which Harrison Ford plays a machine-gun toting president of the United States who fends off Gary Oldman's Russian terrorist as he attempts to hijack the world's most exclusive aircraft, will remember the air-punching finale in which the president and his family successfully complete a mid-air transfer to a rescue plane. So, in one way, Mr Murdoch was correct: the passengers on board Titanic weren't quite so lucky. Then again, it's important to remember that no-one thought Titanic would do anything other than sink. Cameron had spent the past year labouring under the certainty that his passion project would slip beneath the waves on its first weekend, with only the comfort of a safe harbour on the Davy Jones's Locker of the shelves of the local video store.

The film's success was a genuine phenomenon. Elderly couples who had not visited a cinema in decades turned up at the modern multiplex to see what all the fuss was about. Avid fans returned again and again – the only explanation for a box office take twice as high as the previous holder of the world's most successful film, Jurassic Park. Now Mr Cameron has done it again.

For the record, I haven't yet seen Avatar. I haven't been able to book a ticket at Glasgow's IMAX, which is where it is being screened in its full 3D splendour, but this doesn't stop me from doffing my cap – if indeed I wore one and knew exactly what a doff was – towards the man who must now be, without doubt, the most successful director of all time. Cameron, for all his arrogance and bullishness, has twice climbed a peak that no other director can match.

Yet there is now a fly in the ointment. Avatar is clearly too successful. It was reported this week that some fans are skipping out of cinemas on a celluloid high only to tumble into a pit of despair because, drum roll please, life cannot quite compete with the land of the Na'vis, those blue giants who inhabit a rainforest idyll and ride flying dragons into battle against attack helicopters. One commentator to a film website said: "I can't stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film, and all the tears and shivers I got from it. I even contemplated suicide thinking that if I do it, I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora."

Yet the true genius of Avatar is that, unlike Titanic, but like his previous franchise, Terminator, there is plenty of scope for a sequel. So when there is a gold-plated certainty of Avatar 2, surely these avid fans wouldn't risk killing themselves based on the spurious hope that beyond the veil lies a personal Nirvana based entirely on the last film you saw. And what a thought if this was so. Imagine the possibilities: western fans keeling over in front of True Grit and reawakening to find themselves firing six-shooters with "the Duke", or musical fans being carried away by Carousel. This has potential. Think about the chick-flick you switch on during a long, but now doomed flight: you could wind up spending eternity with Sandra Bullock. Just don't have that fatal heart attack in the middle of Saw V!