Word: cameron
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...battle of Avatar vs. the rest of the universe, the James Cameron extravaganza again emerged dominant. At the North American box office, according to early studio estimates, the picture earned $48.5 million, or more than the combined take of the next three movies: the Victorian action-adventure Sherlock Holmes, the singing-rodents comedy Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel and the vampire drama Daybreakers, the weekend's one new release to crack the top four. (See Top 5 Underrated Sci-Fi Movie Masterpieces...
...Cameron's colossal creation was not the only holiday hit with long legs. This weekend, two films in their third week kept luring moviegoers at a healthy pace. Sherlock Holmes took in $16.6 million, for a $165.2 million total, and Alvin squirreled away $16.3 million, for a cumulative $178.2 million. The holdovers had such an edge over newcomers that Hollywood should consider establishing a tier system, like in the English football leagues, with the big Christmastime films at the Premier level and the January releases competing among themselves in a lower group...
...should pass Star Wars: Phantom Menace ($431.1 million), E.T. ($435.1 million) and Shrek 2 ($441.1 million) in a few days, and by next weekend it will overtake the original Star Wars ($461 million) for third place. That leaves only The Dark Knight ($533.3 million) and the all-time champ, Cameron's own Titanic ($600.7 million). In worldwide gross, Avatar is just as impressive: it made another $300 million or so this past week for a total of $1.3 billion. That vaulted it past three of the four other billion-dollar movies: The Dark Knight, the second episode of Pirates...
Note that, of the directors of these nine flops, four were either Academy Award winners (Robert Zemeckis, Ron Howard) or Oscar nominees (Michael Mann, Spike Jonze), whereas Cameron is the only Oscar winner among directors of the top 10 grossers. The lessons: prestige directors get to spend more money, and, in dollar terms, their "personal vision" can look astigmatic to the mass audience. (And great to critics, who put the Mann and Jonze films on their 10-best lists, and would rightly fret if big-budget assignments went only to hacks.) Consider, too, that none of the first seven...
Avatar is already the highest-grossing really good movie of all time (in current dollars). If other powerful writer-directors can get the kind of financial support Cameron did, and make the auteur-audience connection he has, then 2010 and the years beyond it could be worth watching - not just for the numbers, but for the pictures...