Word: avatars
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...Then again, as Groucho might have said, Avatar is better than no tar at all. The happy news for 20th Century Fox, which laid out about $400 million for the movie's production and marketing budgets, is that Avatar mimicked Titanic in pulling in more than twice as much coin abroad ($160 million and counting). Other hopeful auguries: Avatar pulled an A+ rating from CinemaScore's tally of people who had just seen the movie; its score from reviewers in the Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes samplings is a robust 83%; and it has no serious competition until next March...
...There's only one problem with the Fox statement: it isn't true. A check of the numbers for the rest of this weekend's top 10 movies, on Box Office Mojo's daily chart, reveals that all of them sold more tickets on Saturday than on Friday. Only Avatar dipped, by 5%. And, whatever the weather, the overall box office was up a spectacular 58% from the same weekend last year, leading the 2009 tally past the $10 billion mark for the first year ever. So what do we call the alibi for Avatar's Saturday drop? A snow...
...holdover movies slipped from a third to a half of their last-weekend take (The Blind Side holding the sturdiest), except for the Oscar favorite Up in the Air, which soared 30% by adding 103 venues to last week's 72; it amassed nearly as much per screen as Avatar, and at relative bargain-basement prices. One new romantic comedy in wide release was meant to lure a more mature demographic than Avatar, but attracted almost nobody. Did You Hear About the Morgans?, with Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant as a married couple on the lam from a killer...
...Avatar faces a quicker, stiffer challenge from the debuts of a big romantic comedy (It's Complicated, with Meryl Streep, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin), a big action picture (Sherlock Holmes with Robert Downey Jr. as the martial-arts sleuth) and Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, plus the long-awaited wide release of Up in the Air. The competition of that imposing lineup suggests a cloudy forecast for Avatar, with or without snow...
...Avatar, $73 million, first weekend 2. The Princess and the Frog, $12.2 million; $44.8 million, fourth week 3. The Blind Side, $10 million; $164.7 million, fifth week 4. Did You Hear About the Morgans, $7 million, first weekend 5. The Twilight Saga: New Moon, $4.4 million; $274.6 million, fifth week 6. Invictus, $4.1 million; $15.8 million, second week 7. Disney's A Christmas Carol, $3.4 million; $130.8 million, seventh week 8. Up in the Air, $3.1 million; $8.1 million, third week 9. Brothers, $2.6 million; $22.1 million third week 10. Old Dogs, $2.3 million; $43.6 million, fourth week...