Stephen Lang in Avatar (ILM / 20th Century Fox)
Avatar keeps forging ahead. James Cameron’s sci-fi epic has grossed $564.4 million after 42 days out. The #2 movie at the domestic box office (not taking inflation or higher 3D/IMAX ticket prices into account), currently about $55 million behind Cameron's own Titanic, will almost surely be #1 after next weekend's revenues are tallied.
Worldwide (not adjusted for inflation/dollar exchange variations), Avatar has already topped the box-office chart, with $1.9 billion. It passed Titanic a few days ago — the Leonardo DiCaprio-Kate Winslet hit grossed $1.843b — at least in part thanks to the US dollar’s weakness in most key film markets. Also helping was China's and Russia's opening up to Hollywood fare in the last decade.
As I've said before, the picture looks quite different when the box-office charts take inflation into consideration — even while still ignoring Avatar’s 3D/IMAX premium surcharges.
Box Office Mojo estimates that Avatar is now #26 on the all-time domestic box-office chart adjusted for inflation, or eight slots higher than it was ten days ago. It's a notch above the 1965 James Bond flick Thunderball — that's when Sean Connery was still synonymous with Bond — and below the 1978 John Travolta-Olivia Newton-John musical Grease.
Avatar is expected to gross somewhere between $25-30 million this weekend. If so, that means it'll be #21 on Monday, having passed the aforementioned Grease, plus Disney's The Lion King, Disney and Julie Andrews' Mary Poppins, Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks' Disneyesque Forrest Gump and Francis Ford Coppola's Oscar-winning The Godfather, which has nothing to do with Walt Disney in any way whatsoever.
Still right ahead of Avatar will be Fantasia (multiple rereleases), George Lucas' Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, Mike Nichols' The Graduate, and Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Once again, bear in mind that those are approximations based on "average" ticket prices provided by the National Association of Theater Owners. (Box Office Mojo came up with its own estimated average — $7.35 — for 2010; that's the same as NATO's 2009 "average.") An accurate calculation of a film's popularity at the box office — as in, the number of tickets sold (and its ratio to the population size at the time) — would be based on where a movie made most of its money, e.g., a top-dollar New York house, in thousands of cheap small-town theaters, or at 3D/IMAX theaters that charge a premium.
It’s also worth remembering that population increases, changes in movie-going demographics, and the growth of entertainment alternatives (home video, cable television, pay-per-view options) should all be taken into consideration when comparing the box-office success of movies from different eras. And that many of the movies found on Box Office Mojo's inflation-adjusted chart had one, two, or a dozen rereleases throughout the decades.
The effect of piracy on a movie’s box-office performance remains highly debatable. It all depends on the type of movie (would you rather watch Avatar on your computer screen or at a 3D movie house?), the quality of the pirated material (high-def. copies vs. crummy reproductions), and where the copying is taking place (Beverly Hills or Lagos or Karachi, where most people who’d buy 50-cent copies of Hollywood flicks wouldn’t be able to afford going to the movies, anyhow).
No matter what you say Avatar will be regarded as the greatest movie of our time, GWTW was seen only in America no body else would have even cared about seeing it, AVATAR has no barriers as to language, religion, Age or country ie is why it is the greatest movie ever made.