“Avatar” continues to set new benchmarks every week, now collecting what has to be the biggest and first Golden Globe award ever presented to a 3D movie — the top GG award for best motion picture drama of the year, as well as best overall director for Cameron.
Earlier last week the movie became the first to cross the $100 million threshold in IMAX theaters worldwide, where it set a new record for Hollywood features in IMAX theaters several weeks ago when it reached $66.4 million during the New Year’s weekend. Through today (Monday, Jan. 18), it will total an estimated $116 million, according to Paul Dergarabedian’s Hollywood.com Box-Office Weekend re-cap. Many of the showings at the 179 IMAX theaters domestivally are still selling out and actually increasing their percentage of overall “Avatar” business – up to more than 17% this weekend to an estimated $9 million through Martin Luther King Day ($76.3 mil. domestically to date), up from 16% last weekend. Overseas this weekend’s IMAX “Avatar” numbers are $4.6 mil on 81 screens for a global to-date total of $39.4).
With another $41.3 mil. in domestic gross this weekend (and $125 million overseas for a cumulative total of $1.606 billion), it is also the first movie to top the charts for five weeks since “The Sixth Sense” 11 years ago in 1999, and is poised to surpass the overseas $1.242 billion record of “Titanic.” “Avatar” stands at $1.115 billion in international grosses.
During the awards weekend, MTV coaxed a little more information out of Cameron about the home edition of the movie, which he said would include 10 minutes – 12 minutes of extra footage, including about 10 more seconds of the sex scene between the lead characters.
– By Scott Hettrick