Avatar tops $1 billion worldwide

Avatar tops $1 billion

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James Cameron's science-fiction epic Avatar has had another stellar weekend shooting past US$1 billion (NZ$1.38 billion) worldwide, only the fifth movie ever to hit that mark.

No. 1 for the third-straight weekend, 20th Century Fox's "Avatar" raised its total in the United Sates to US$352.1 million after just 17 days. The film added US$133 million overseas to lift its international haul to $670 million, for a worldwide gross of $1.02 billion.

"Avatar" opened two weekends earlier with $77 million, a strong start but far below dozens of other blockbusters that debuted as high as $158 million. But business for other blockbusters usually tumbles in following weekends, while "Avatar" revenues barely dropped over the busy Christmas and New Year's weekends.

"It's like a runaway freight train. It just keeps doing business," said Fox distribution executive Bert Livingston. "Here's what's happening: I think everybody has to see Avatar once. Even people who don't normally go to the movies, they've heard about it and are saying, 'I have to see it'. Then there's those people seeing it multiple times."

Avatar was Cameron's first film since 1997's Titanic, the biggest modern blockbuster with US$1.8 billion worldwide.

Cameron now is the only filmmaker to direct two movies that have topped US$1 billion. Along with Titanic, the others are The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King at $1.13 billion, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest at $1.06 billion and The Dark Knight at a fraction over $1 billion, according to box-office tracker Hollywood.com.

With Avatar closing in on No. 2 film The Return of the King, Cameron is in striking distance of having the two top-grossing movies globally.

Avatar has had a price advantage over those other billion-dollar movies. About 75 percent of its domestic business has come from theaters showing it in digital 3-D presentation, those tickets typically costing a few dollars more than admissions for the 2-D version.

Finishing at No. 2 for the weekend was Robert Downey Jr.'s crime caper Sherlock Holmes with US$38.4 million. The Warner Bros. film lifted itsUnited States total to US$140.7 million after 10 days in theaters.

In third place was 20th Century Fox's family tale Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel with US$36.6 million. It raised its 10-day total to $157.3 million.

The top-three movies, along with solid holdovers that included Universal's It's Complicated at No. 4 with $18.7 million, steered Hollywood to a big start to 2010 after a year of record revenue.

Hollywood finished 2009 with US$10.6 billion in the US, easily surpassing the previous record of $9.7 billion in 2007, according to Hollywood.com.

In Hollywood's glory years of the 1930s and '40s, before television eroded the movie audience, estimated movie attendance ran as high as 4 billion some years.

Like Titanic 12 years ago, Avatar has fairly clear sailing now that the holidays are over. Hollywood is entering a slow season, when fewer big movies arrive and competition is lighter.

Titanic lingered as the No. 1 film for months leading up to the Academy Awards, where it won 11 Oscars, including best picture and director.

Avatar also proved a critical favorite with strong Oscar potential. Cameron broke new ground in combining live-action, digitally-enhanced performances, visual effects and 3-D presentation to immerse viewers in his futuristic tale of humans and aliens on a distant moon.

"Leave it to James Cameron to do this. To not only set the technical world on fire, the visual world on fire, but also the box-office world on fire 12 years after Titanic," said Paul Dergarabedian, box-office analyst for Hollywood.com.

- AP