Avatar grossed an estimated $25 million at the domestic box office on Friday, New Year’s Day, surpassing the $300 million mark, reports Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood. The total domestic gross of James Cameron’s sci-fi epic currently stands at $308.8m. Worldwide, it’s at more than $800m. For this weekend, estimates have been hovering around $60m. Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law, earned an estimated $14.8m on Friday; Alvin and Chipmunks: The Squeakquel grossed $13m; and the Meryl Streep-Alec Baldwin-Steve Martin romantic comedy It’s Complicated added another $7.1m. George Clooney’s Up in the Air, which will likely receive a number of Oscar nominations come next February, grossed $4m.Also, Sandra Bullock’s The Blind Side crossed the $200m mark domestically on Friday, after earning $4.5m. The sentimental drama has been out for 7 weeks. (It hasn’t opened internationally, yet.) Rob Marshall’s all-star musical Nine, on the other hand, earned only $1.4m for a total of $11.2m after about two weeks in general release.
Many have been comparing Avatar’s take to that of Titanic, but for the most part those comparisons are misguided. Ticket prices are on the average much higher today — $4.59 vs. $7.18 in 2008 — and most of Avatar’s money has been generated at 3D/IMAX theaters that charge premiums (e.g., $17.50 is the cost for one adult to watch Avatar at a 3D/IMAX AMC theater in Los Angeles). Also, back in 1998 Titanic was screened at fewer theaters than Avatar and its running time is more than half an hour longer. All those things should be considered when comparing Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet’s 2D romance to the 3D Na’vi effect.
Aside from "Avatar," only two other films have crossed the $300 million threshold quicker — "The Dark Knight" in ten days and "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" in fourteen.
AVATAR pulled another $25 million in ticket sales on New Years Day alone, which according to Variety puts the film at $300 million. That ranks the film as the third highest-grossing movie of 2009, behind HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF_BLOOD PRINCE and TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN. Even more amazing is that Cameron’s box office juggernaut TITANIC took 44 days to reach this milestone, whereas AVATAR took only 15 days. And, just to add some additional sweetness to the punch, it’s been estimated that the current worldwide gross of AVATAR could be in the ballpark of $800 million. Congrats, Mr. Cameron! You’ve done it once again!
After just 17 days, James Cameron’s "Avatar" has crossed $1 billion at the global box office and moving ahead of last year's juggernaut "The Dark Knight" which was the previous 4.
In fact if numbers continue along estimates, the film is expected to pass "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest" and "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" to become second-biggest worldwide release of all time behind only Cameron's "Titanic".
How big is this phenomenon? Domestically Cameron's film took in $68.3 million in its third weekend, easily beating the previous record of a third weekend gross of $45 million garnered by "Spider-Man 3".
At the U.S. box-office it has made $352 million so far, the second-largest grossing film of 2009. It's expected to pass the $402 million that "Transformers Revenge of the Fallen" earned by the weekend - achieving in three weeks what took 'Fallen' nearly four months to achieve.
Outside the US the film also currently sits at 2 for 2009 with $667 million, just behind "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs" with $691 million which "Avatar" will overtake in the next day or two.
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