Although I suspect James Cameron would have gladly surrendered the weekend's box office crown to Mel Gibson's Edge of Darkness if it meant he could win the Directors Guild award (setting himself up for an Oscar win), it sure didn't work out that way. Cameron lost the DGA to Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker, and his film won a seventh box office weekend with no trouble at all.
In earning another $30 million, Avatar is just two or three days away from making Titanic a complete historical footnote. Already closing in on $2 billion in total ticket sales, the only claim left for Avatar to stake is the domestic box office title, some $6 million away. At its current weekend rate of dipping about 20% each frame, Avatar will likely do a little better than that next weekend because of the Oscar nominations, and the math is simple: $625 - $630 million by this time next week, and maybe $650 million by the end of Valentine's Day weekend.
How far it can go after that is anyone's guess. How long does Fox keep it around after the Oscars, when will people stop going back to see it? I think March 5th - 7th is the last gasp. That's when Alice in Wonderland takes most of the IMAX screens dedicated to Avatar right now and it's also the Oscars, for which Avatar is suddenly not the movie to beat in any major category. But I think it's hard to look at a US number any lower than $675 million by that point, and the total global box office may well be in excess of $2.2 billion.
Edge of Darkness did OK, Mel Gibson can kinda sorta open a movie after an eight-year layoff, but it didn't resonate the way Taken did a year ago. But the film didn't hit $20 million, the ballpark figure for opening weekend success if a movie opens in more than 3,000 theaters. So, Mel's carrying about 75% of the audience that he was expected to. It probably will not age very well with From Paris with Love and Shutter Island opening within the next three weeks.
The romantic comedy When in Rome wound up in third place, but it did what Mad Mel could not: The Kristen Bell flick actually performed slightly better than a lot of projections. Elsewhere in the genre, Meryl Streep's It's Complicated has now made over $100 million, and in the past 18 months, Meryl Streep has had three films that have averaged $113 million, plus (barring some weird event on Tuesday) two more Oscar nominations. That's pretty good for a 60-year-old in an industry that is sorely lacking in female box office stars.
The Top Five:
1 - Avatar ($30 million)
2 - Edge of Darkness ($17.1 million)
3 - When in Rome ($12 million)
4 - The Tooth Fairy ($10 million)
5 - The Book of Eli ($8.8 million)
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