tMF | The Movie-Fanatic

Is it really even news anymore? For the seventh week in a row Avatar holds on to the top spot at the box office and is showing no signs of slowing down.  It is easy to be bored with this story after almost two months on repeat but to put things into perspective for a minute; Avatar has achieved almost every box office record there is in just 45 days.  At $595 million and counting Avatar has made about $13 million per day or just over $1 million every two hours since it was released.  And that is only counting domestic receipts.  If you count its total gross it has made $45 million per day.  Incredible doesn’t begin to describe it.



As amazing as those figures are, there isn’t much drama left to be found in the numbers.  Last week Avatar passed Titanic to become the highest grossing film of all time and the first to surpass $2 billion in worldwide grosses. Stateside, with a total of around $595 million, it should pass Titanic again later in the week to take down that record too.

With the crown for domestic, overseas, and worldwide grosses firmly in hand the focus this week will shift to the Academy Awards.  The nominations will be announced Tuesday morning and the question becomes, how many awards will Avatar be nominated for?  More importantly, how many can it win?  The biggest win so far this awards season was at the Golden Globes where it won Best Picture – Drama and James Cameron took Best Director honors.  Still, almost every other major award has The Hurt Locker and director Kathryn Bigelow – Cameron’s ex-wife – racking up wins.  The Hurt Locker is certainly the better film but it’s hard to argue with the theatre experience and overall mass appeal Avatar brings to the table, so it’ll be interesting nonetheless.

Believe it or not there were other movies playing in theatres this weekend.  Mel Gibson returned to a starring role for the first time in years with Edge of Darkness.  In a decent role in a forgettable movie, the one-time box office draw had a moderately disappointing outing with a $17.1 million debut.  This week’s other new release When in Rome somehow managed $12.0 million.

This week poses little threat to the runaway train with another seasonably weak offering of new releases with the Nicolas Sparks adaptation, Dear John and the latest John Travolta as a bad guy trying to take something from someone in Pierre Morel’s From Paris with Love.

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Weekend Box Office: January 29-31, 2010 (estimated)

#	Title	Weekend Gross	Total Gross
1	Avatar	$30,000,000	$594,472,000
2	Edge of Darkness	$17,120,000	NEW
3	When in Rome	$12,065,000	NEW
4	The Tooth Fairy	$10,000,000	$26,106,000
5	The Book of Eli	$8,770,000	$74,373,000

Source: Box Office Mojo