Avatar Conquers 2009 Box Office with $48 Million Weekend

Posted by John Cairns (jcairns@filmschoolrejects.com) on January 10, 2010 Share

It has become a recurring theme here at the Reject Report. Every weekend, it seems, Avatar faces the box office competition. And every weekend, the competition winds up crushed as Avatar storms to another box office victory. The $48 million weekend for Avatar not only clinches a fourth weekend in a row at the top for the 3D flick, but also clinches Avatar the domestic box office title against all 2009 releases at $429,040,000, almost $27 million ahead of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Avatar clinched the box office title with another incredible $21,250,000 haul on Saturday, putting it over the top.

And Avatar moved into second place of all time worldwide earlier this week, behind Titanic. In fact, it sure looks like it is closing in fast on Titanic’s worldwide record: the total haul is now $1.331 billion.

As expected, Sherlock and Alvin again finished well back. The top new release was Daybreakers at $15 million. All in all, the box office results were really not much of a surprise.

Wow, what can I say? I know there’s inflation and all that to consider, and I know Avatar benefited from all these jacked-up ticket prices at these 3-D venues, but this is still mightily impressive. What’s really surprising is that even in a down week for the box office and with Avatar suffering its first significant decline since it opened, the fact is the movie still made a lot of money. In fact, it only dropped 29 percent, which is most weekends isn’t much of a decline at all. So this movie really is showing no sign of stopping its box office climb anytime soon. As far as the domestic box office is concerned, Avatar continues to lag behind the record-setting pace of The Dark Knight (which made $441 million by this point in time), but remains ahead of the pace of Titanic. And if you throw out the first five days, Avatar has actually outpaced The Dark Knight. When you’re still on a pace like this after four weeks, all this talk about beating Titanic remains justifiable.

Next week will be the test. If Avatar can get past next weekend still in first place, it has a shot at all-time greatness. Even The Dark Knight wasn’t able to accomplish that. Personally, I think Avatar has a great shot at five weekends in a row on top. Here’s something to consider: in its fourth and final weekend on top of the box office The Dark Knight hauled in $26 million. But here, a year-and-a-half later, Avatar is hauling in $48 million!! There is no question about it: Avatar has a shot at toppling the biggest record of them all, based on numbers like this.

The question of whether Avatar actually will win a fifth weekend in a row will have to wait until the next Reject Report later this week. For now, here are the domestic box office numbers from another winning, box-office-title-clinching Avatar weekend: