This news is so very incomprehensible, you might just find yourself staring at the numbers for an hour or two before snapping out a shock-induced coma.

It’s no secret that Avatar was the biggest movie that this or any other world has ever seen (maybe…I hear Omicron Persei 8 is remaking Bikini Party Summer). With a budget somewhere in the $250 million to $300 million budget, the risk was unheard of and failure would have been of cataclysmic proportions. But we should all know by now that James Cameron knows best, and he’s about to have a very good day because of it.

Avatar went on to destroy the box office and all records in its path. Before we knew it, the only significant record left was Cameron’s other dominant force, Titanic, and its untouchable $600 million domestic gross bar-setter. Avatar not only touched that record but assaulted it, now sitting $150 million past previous record…and with a special theatrical re-release still to come in August, no less.

So how much does a director make for this? It all comes down to percentages. Big name talents usually sign a sizable contract consisting of a salary percentage that will be paid based on how the movie performs at the box office. Cameron, acting as not only the director but also as writer and producer, had a nice, fat percentage coming his way, as you might imagine. With Avatar pulling in $2.7 BILLION to date, the payday for the man at the wheel is beyond anything anyone could have imagined.

According to a report by Deadline, James Cameron will be taking home a $350 million paycheck for his work on Avatar. Yes, you read that correctly — Cameron will be making more than even the biggest movies cost to make, and more than the majority of films ever come close to scoring in their own respective box office runs.

What could be even more surprising than this, you ask? The reason this payoff is so big is not due to this unheard of box office run, but the success that Avatar has since found on DVD and Blu-ray. There’s a reason movies go from theaters to the disc in only a few short months these days, and this is just further proof of the dollars to be had on screens big and small.