'Avatar' continues its reign with the highest-grossing third weekend ever

By Sarah Sluis

Three weeks into Avatar's run, the movie has kept its altitude when most other movies would have dropped off by tens of millions by now. Cue box-office records falling. This weekend it grossed $68.3 million, and broke the records for top gross on New Year's Day, as well as the highest-grossing third weekend ever. It's now the #4 top-grossing movie worldwide, below Titanic, The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. While James Cameron's Titanic ended up with $1.8 billion worldwide and won't be unseated anytime soon, his Avatar only has to earn another $100 million before it assumes the #2 spot worldwide: give it a week or so.

Will it be possible for Avatar to submerge Titanic? At this point, it's outpacing Titanic's first three weeks, but then again, so were the movies in the #2 and #3 spots for worldwide gross. All the buzz and projections have the movie placing behind Titanic when the dust settles, but the sci-fi spectacle could end up getting closer than predicted. It's also worth noting that although the movie has placed #4 worldwide, it's still #15 domestically, where stalwarts like Star Wars and E.T., released before foreign box office had as big of a share, remain.

The only new release of the week, Sony Picture Classics' awards contender The White Ribbon, grossed $20,000 per location in a three-theatre release. Another one of the distributor's releases, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, came away with the highest per-screen average of the weekend, $32,000.

Most of the returnees in the top ten posted minimal drops or modest gains. The worst-off was Sherlock Holmes, which fell 38% to $38 million. The biggest gain came from The Princess and the Frog, which added 11% to its total to finish with $10 million, followed closely by a 10.3% gain from The Blind Side, which finished two spots higher than Frog with $12.6 million.

Awards favorite Up in the Air also generated a healthy number of ticket sales, going up .7% from last week to make $11.3 million in ticket sales.

This Friday a romance, comedy, and vampire movie will debut in theatres, but don't expect any of them to grab the top spot from Avatar.