3D “Avatar” surged past “Sherlock Holmes

LOS ANGELES — Hollywood’s last weekend of the year was its best ever, as James Cameron’s 3-D “Avatar” surged past “Sherlock Holmes,” an action romp with Robert Downey Jr. in the lead role, for top position in a film lineup that took in a record $278 million at the domestic box office.


The film industry had previously seen its highest dollar figure for a three-day weekend in July 2008, when “The Dark Knight” led an array of summer movies that had $260.8 million in ticket sales.

Fox scored an exceptionally strong second weekend with “Avatar,” which had $75 million in ticket sales, down just 2.5 percent from its $77 million opening the previous weekend, for a total of $212.3 million in domestic ticket sales. It added another hit with “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel,” an animated comedy that had an estimated $50.2 million in domestic ticket sales in its first weekend, and $77 million since opening on Wednesday.

Bert Livingston, Fox’s senior vice -president for distribution, said “Avatar” was being driven by what he called “exceptional” word-of-mouth recommendations.



“Do I have a number? No,” Mr. Livingston said of the ultimate box-office prospects for the movie, which represents 15 years of work by Mr. Cameron and hundreds of millions of dollars in investment by Fox. But Mr. Livingston said he expects the film to pass the $300 million mark at the domestic box office quickly, and perhaps to challenge the $533 million in ticket sales for “The Dark Knight,” though probably not the $600 million taken in by Mr. Cameron’s “Titanic” a decade earlier.

“Sherlock Holmes,” which was directed by Guy Ritchie, took in $65.4 million on its opening weekend for Warner Brothers, to place second after having briefly edged slightly ahead of “Avatar” on Christmas Day.

That performance cemented Warner’s lead in the domestic box-office rankings among studios. Boosted by hits like “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” and “The Hangover,” Warner captured roughly 20 percent of domestic ticket sales for the year, comfortably outpacing all of its rivals, according to a count from the Web site Boxofficemojo.com.

“It’s Complicated,” a comedy directed by Nancy Meyers with Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin in lead roles, placed fourth, with $22.1 million in ticket sales in its opening weekend for Universal Pictures and Relativity Media. Paramount Pictures’ “Up in the Air,” directed by Jason Reitman, with George Clooney in a starring role, was the weekend’s fifth-ranked film, with $11.8 million in sales, for a total of $24.5 million since its opening; it made its debut in a handful of theaters on Dec. 4 and went into wide release on Dec. 23.

Aided by a steady rise in ticket prices, Hollywood has taken in $10.4 billion at the box office this year, moving well past a previous full-year record of $9.68 billion set in 2007, according to Hollywood.com’s box-office reporting service. But a few years earlier in the decade it actually made more money when the totals are adjusted for inflation.

Total sales are expected to be about 1.4 billion tickets for the full year, up about 5 percent from 1.3 billion last year, though still well short of the 1.6 billion mark set in 2002, Hollywood.com said.

For a second year, the robust performance by a wide field of films pointed toward a strong first quarter at the box office. Christmas hits tend to play for weeks, as the audience catches up with competing pictures through the holidays and early January.

In 2009, double-digit increases in box -office results through the first quarter helped offset declines from DVD revenue, while feeding the film industry’s shift away from dramas that play well on home video toward event films like the science-fiction thriller “Avatar,” whose state-of-the-art effects demand to be seen in a theater.

“Avatar” has been helped by a steady increase in the number of screens using 3-D technology from companies like RealD and Imax. Over the weekend, for instance, 179 Imax theaters contributed $8.8 million to the film’s domestic ticket sales, for a total of $28 million in domestic Imax sales since the film opened.

Source:http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/avatar-leads-christmas-weekend-box-office-to-record-high/?scp=2&sq=avatar&st=cse