LOS ANGELES — After a strong Martin Luther King Day weekend there’s no doubt left that James Cameron’s Avatar will surpass Titanic atop the box office charts, but two new movies managed to find their audiences, too.
The 3-D phenomenon Avatar raked in an additional $54.6 million from Friday through Monday, according to an estimate from distributor 20th Century Fox.
The Denzel Washington action film The Book of Eli and Peter Jackson-directed book adaptation The Lovely Bones had healthy debuts of $38 million and $20.5 million, respectively.
The Jackie Chan family comedy The Spy Next Door, meanwhile, had a so-so opening of $13 million.
Avatar also had another big weekend overseas, collecting $129 million from 112 territories.
Its $14.5 million debut in Italy, the last major country where it hadn’t yet launched, was the biggest ever for a film there, said Fox.
As of Monday, Avatar had grossed $1.12 billion internationally and $505 million domestically.
Within the next week, it will surpass the $1.24 billion that Titanic, Cameron’s last picture and still the most successful of all time worldwide, collected overseas.
Shortly thereafter, it should pass the 1997-98 film’s domestic total of $600.8 million.
Eleven years ago, of course, ticket prices were a lot cheaper—the most recent estimated average ticket price was $7.46, compared with $4.69 in 1998.
And the vast majority of people are seeing Avatar on 3-D screens, which carry a ticket price surcharge of several dollars.
The result: far fewer people have seen Avatar than Titanic so far. Avatar has sold fewer than 70 million tickets in the U.S. and Canada; Titanic sold more than 125 million.
However, despite its consistent popularity for the past five weeks, Avatar seems to have plenty of gas left, as evidenced by its small decline in ticket sales this past weekend.
Wins for best director and best dramatic picture at the Golden Globes Sunday night should help it with more sophisticated moviegoers who don’t often attend tentpole pictures.
“I think it will sustain modest drops as we keep moving through awards season,” said Chris Aronson, executive vice president of domestic distribution for Fox.
“Some people are seeing this film multiple times and there are still a lot of others who haven’t seen it yet.”
Eli looks like it will be a success for independent financier Alcon Entertainment, following its surprise hit The Blind Side.
Produced for $80 million, the post-apocalyptic tale is off to a good start and received an average audience grade of B+, according to market research firm CinemaScore.
That means it should benefit from solid word-of-mouth in the coming weeks.
Despite its religious themes, the movie didn’t play any better in smaller and midsized markets, like The Blind Side has, said Dan Fellman, president of domestic distribution for Warner
Bros., which released the movie for Alcon.
Despite a poor performance at three theaters over the last month, The Lovely Bones found the young female audience Paramount Pictures was targeting this weekend as it expanded nationwide.
The big question is whether the Peter Jackson-directed adaptation of the best-selling book will continue to play well or if it will quickly exhaust a small but fervent audience of teen- and college-aged females.
Mixed reviews and the movie’s poor performance in limited release indicate that it will not draw many adults.
Paramount hopes it has a smaller-scale Twilight on its hands, but with a good-but-not-great average audience grade of B, it remains to be seen if it will perform anything like the teen vampire sensation.
The Jackie Chan family comedy The Spy Next Door, which Lionsgate released for financier Relativity Media, had a mediocre debut of $13 million over the four-day weekend.
Moviegoers, overwhelmingly parents with young kids, gave the movie a strong average grade of A-.
Of the films that opened last weekend, romantic comedy Leap Year had a decent hold of 35 percent, making up a bit for its so-so start.
Lionsgate’s horror movie Daybreakers plunged 68 percent from its stronger debut, and Weinstein Co.’s Michael Cera comedy Youth in Revolt dropped off 56 percent after an already weak bow.
In limited release, the well-reviewed Leo Tolstoy biopic The Last Station opened to a solid $98,723 in three theaters following a one-week run to quality for Oscar consideration late last year.
Though there was little bad news for movie studios this weekend, total grosses were down 11 percent from the same weekend last year, according to Hollywood.com.
Big gains at the box office will be difficult in the next several months, as the winter of 2009 was huge.
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