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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...
Avatar has now beaten, crushed, spindled and mutilated the competition for four weekends in a row, the first movie to do so since The Dark Knight in the summer of 2008. This week it will also become the first Hollywood feature film to top $100 million worldwide in specialized IMAX theaters - which charge more per ticket, as do the 3-D showings in regular theaters, and help boost Avatar's overall numbers. Out for just 24 days, the movie has earned an astounding $429 million on domestic screens, which means it dethroned Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen...
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...
...stadiums, for instance, are nearly finished - and they look fantastic. But for fans and players alike, the biggest doubts over the soccer tournament, which begins in June, center on security. South Africa has some of the highest levels of violent crime in the world, and protecting half a million foreigners, many of whom will be men with a taste for beer, would be nigh-on impossible anywhere, let alone in a country where the police can be inept and corrupt. Add in a world press that's only too ready to confirm the unimaginative (and mistaken) view that Africa only...
...director of the California Budget Project, a think tank focused on low- and middle-income families. A recent study by this nonpartisan group found that the state, now suffering 12.3% unemployment, has lost all of the nonfarm jobs gained during the recent economic expansion. Nonfarm employment rose from 14.3 million in 2003 to a peak of 15.2 million in 2007. By July, it had fallen to 14.2 million...