Sometimes you've just got to stand back and give the guy some credit. James Cameron is presumably cackling inside his solid-gold mansion on the moon and guzzling buckets of 500-year-old whisky right now. His decision to spend the equivalent of the GNP of Guinea-Bissau on Avatar appears to have paid off. Like a juggernaut with no brakes the film has overtaken The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King as the second in the list of all-time worldwide box-office grossers. As Avatar chugged into the weekend, its fourth on release, the figure was at $1.31bn (£821.83m). It has just opened in China ($14.4m in three days) and has already scooped up $90.2m in France, $62.9m in Germany, and $58.1m in Britain. (Its tickets, as with all 3D films, are more expensive than standard.) Cameron is on target to overtake his own No 1 position: Titanic's $1.84bn (£1.15bn). Then he really will be king of the world.

No film can rack up these figures without plenty of repeat business, and Avatar has attracted plenty of loyal supporters. It's time for Twihards, those diehard fans of Twilight, to go home; now is the era of the Avatards. This is the moniker of dubious taste being applied to the kind of people who – a mere month after first finding out about them – are utterly devoted to the Na'vi, the Hometree, the Toruk, and other ideas created by Cameron and his scriptwriting team. (Why has so little attention been paid to the debt Avatar owes to John Boorman's The Emerald Forest?) Sad little posts are festooning Avatar-worship sites such as naviblue.com: "Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na'vi made me want to be one of them"; "I'm trying anything to just escape this reality and live there instead, even trying to put myself into a coma so my dream world would be Pandora"; "My urge to be a Na'vi is probably the strongest thing I have ever felt". Best to move on fast.

Whether Avatar is any good barely seems to matter. When the film was first released, reviewers appeared unable to resist the mounting anticipation, and disgorged oceans of admiring prose. I can't say I joined in the acclaim. I felt compelled to write a less-than-complimentary review, which resulted in streams of abuse on aggregator sites such as Rotten Tomatoes, and I've since been tagged, not entirely correctly, as "the guy that doesn't like Avatar".

Graham Greene once wrote that "it is wrong to despise popularity in the cinema"; neither, though, is popularity something that should colour our judgment. The mood seems to be changing, though, with the feeling that we've got another Phantom Menace on our hands: the studios may be hoovering up our billions, but we're stuck with Jar Jar Binks and Princess Neytiri. Thanks.