Box Office: 'Avatar' Overtakes 'Titanic' in the US

Wednesday

03Feb2010

Box Office: 'Avatar' Overtakes 'Titanic' in the US

Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 6:07PM

Ring the bell: Avatar has knocked out Titanic. All that was left was the US total, right at $600 million for the big boat movie; Avatar has been the world's highest-grossing film for a little over a week.

The new total, sure to grow by at least another $50 - $75 million, is $601,141,551. Fandango reports that after the Oscar nominations came out, Avatar ticket sales were boosted by some 45%. Of course, it's hitting a little over $2 million a day during the week, so 45% is not that big in the grand scheme of things.

Still, it should continue to perform very well for at least another ten days; it gets pretty crowded on the 12th. And Avatar has started to cool off, even though it just wrapped up its seventh straight stanza at the top of the box office and it could do the same thing again this weekend.

If it wins the Oscar - not a foregone conclusion by a longshot - then there will be more money in James Cameron's coffers, but let's not get crazy. Titanic is not the blueprint for this film. There's never been a blueprint for Avatar's performance. Titanic made another $200 million after its Academy Awards win, but it was in theaters forever, and that just won't happen again. For as much money as Fox has made with Avatar, the studio won't keep this on hundreds of screens into the summer, because they have other movies that want to make money and need those theaters.

Seriously, when the summer session kicked off in May 1998, Titanic was still on over 2,500 screens. Sorry, that ain't happening again. On March 5th, Avatar is losing its IMAX screens (over $100 million of its revenue so far), so there's a ding, and Fox can certainly make more money off the DVD and Blu-ray in a couple months than it can off smaller and smaller weekends at the box office. So whatever it winds up making, it probably only has until about late April to do most of its damage. Well, actually, it's done most of its damage already.

And now it stands completely alone at the top of the heap.

Colin Boyd |

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