Is there nothing, or no one who can challenge Avatar? Well, other than Porky's?
James Cameron's box-office streamroller flattened the returning Mel Gibson to claim its seventh straight box-office win. One more, and it'll tie three other films, including the aforementioned Porky's, for the sixth-longest stay at No. 1.
Avatar grossed an estimated $30 million Friday-Sunday, and handily led Gibson's Edge of Darkness ($17.1 million) and Kristen Bell's When in Rome ($12.5 million). More details:
• Already the worldwide box-office champ, Avatar inched—well, yard-ed—ever closer to Titanic's domestic record. Cameron's new movie stands at $594.5 million; his old movie towers, for now, at $600.9 million.
• At the rate it's going, look for Avatar to take Titanic's domestic record by as soon as Tuesday or Wednesday.
• If Avatar ties and passes Porky's, et. al, it'll still have a ways to go match the longest box-office winning streaks: 15 straight weekends, held by, yes, Titanic; and, 16 overall weekends, held by E.T.
• For those who continue to insist Avatar's success is a figment of IMAX prices, two remarkable things: (1) the movie is playing like movies of this era are not supposed to play—roughly the same number of people make the pilgrimage to see it week in, week out; and, (2) even on Box Office Mojo's handy adjusted-for-inflation chart, it is the highest-grossing movie of the 2000s, and the sixth highest-grossing movie of the VHS/DVD era, which we're going to arbitrarily declare as anything released in 1982 or after.
• Mel Gibson hasn't starred in a movie for so long, it's impossible to compare Edge of Darkness to his past openers. Maybe a better model is Denzel Washington's The Book of Eli, an R-rated drama starring a man too old to play a father on the CW, which, oh, by the way, bowed way bigger last month.
• If you compare When in Rome to Leap Year, then When in Rome looks huge.
• In their second weekends, The Tooth Fairy ($10 million) held well, but needed to hold a while longer to match its $48 million budget; Legion ($6.8 million) fell fast, but topped its $25 million budget.
• Brendan Fraser's and Harrison Ford's Extraordinary Measures ($2.6 million; $10.4 million) dropped out of the Top 10 after a one-weekend stay.
• Robert Downey Jr.'s Sherlock Holmes ($4.5 million) moved in on $200 million domestically.
Here's a rundown of the weekend's top-grossing films, per estimates compiled by Exhibitor Relations:
- Avatar, $30 million
- Edge of Darkness, $17.1 million
- When in Rome, $12.1 million
- The Tooth Fairy, $10 million
- The Book of Eli, $8.8 million
- Legion, $6.8 million
- The Lovely Bones, $4.7 million
- Sherlock Holmes, $4.5 million
- Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, $4 million
- It's Complicated, $3.7 million
(Originally published Jan. 31, 2010, at 8:47 a.m. PT)
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