It won’t be long now. After yet another dominant weekend—its sixth at #1, and still at a strong 2-1 margin over its next closest competitor—James Cameron’s Avatar inched closer to topping his own Titanic as the all-time domestic box-office champ. The film only needs less than $50 million more to put it over the magical $600,788,188 mark, and it’s also even closer ($6 million) to beating Titanic’s worldwide gross of $1.84 billion. It’s not a movie at this point; it’s an island resort country with membership in the U.N. This weekend found Avatar shedding a mere 15% of its business from the previous week, scoring $36 million in receipts. In distant second was the not-screened-for-critics horror cheapie Legion, which at $18.2 million wildly exceeded all reasonable expectations—to say nothing of justice. Happily, Tooth Fairy was the rare occasion when someone didn’t make a buck underestimating the intelligence of the populace; despite the reliable Dwayne Johnson and kid-friendly Santa Clause plot, the film limped into fourth with $14.5 million. That left poor Extraordinary Measures, the indifferently received first release from CBS Films, to stumble furthest among the new releases, earning a paltry $7 million despite Harrison Ford working around the clock on publicity (albeit with great reluctance).
In limited release, the Charles Darwin biopic Creation, once thought an Oscar contender before it bowed with a thud at Toronto in September, brought in a disappointing $7,500 per screen average. The numbers were a little kinder to André Techiné’s The Girl On The Train, which enjoyed $10,000 per screen.
For more detailed numbers, visit Box Office Mojo.