[banjomonster]

You could however make quite a lot of 3min music videos for the cost of an Avatar (237m according to Wikipedia). If it cost 2m per video, you could make 100 for less than the cost of an avatar, and even if only half of these made the 70m you mention, you'd still have grossed 3.5 billion.

[notahacker]

Sure, but you're not going to get 70 million people paying 99 cents for a one time stream of a 3 minute music video in the foreseeable future.

A better comparison point would be YouTube's HD video list, which perhaps more closely approximates the production values an independent filmmaker might aspire to. The top HD videos on YouTube mostly have <10 million views. And they're short, and free.