Weekend Box Office: Gunnin' For That #1 Spot
It won’t be long now. After yet another dominant weekend—its sixth at #1, and still at a strong 2-1 margin over its next closest competitor—James Cameron’s Avatar inched closer to topping his own Titanic as the all-time domestic box-office champ. The film only needs less than $50 million more to put it over the magical $600,788,188 mark, and it’s also even closer ($6 million) to beating Titanic’s worldwide gross of $1.84 billion. It’s not a movie at this point; it’s an island resort country with membership in the U.N. This weekend found Avatar shedding a mere 15% of its business from the previous week, scoring $36 million in receipts. In distant second was the not-screened-for-critics horror cheapie Legion, which at $18.2 million wildly exceeded all reasonable expectations—to say nothing of justice. Happily, Tooth Fairy was the rare occasion when someone didn’t make a buck underestimating the intelligence of the populace; despite the reliable Dwayne Johnson and kid-friendly Santa Clause plot, the film limped into fourth with $14.5 million. That left poor Extraordinary Measures, the indifferently received first release from CBS Films, to stumble furthest among the new releases, earning a paltry $7 million despite Harrison Ford working around the clock on publicity (albeit with great reluctance).