Avatar King

As I hinted in my review of James Cameron’s latest offering, Avatar finally passed Cameron’s own Titanic on February 2^nd on the domestic front, to claim the crown of top box office grosser of all time domestically as well as internationally and worldwide:

Avatar has sailed past Titanic to become the highest-grossing movie of all time. In just 47 days, Avatar has grossed $601.1 million, while Titanic made $600.8 million in its entire run and took 252 days to cross the $600 million mark.

With this milestone, Avatar has completed the triple crown of box office gross records: first, it topped the foreign-only chart on Jan. 23, then it reigned over the worldwide chart (foreign plus domestic) on Jan. 25, and now, as of Feb. 2, it resides atop the domestic chart.

The article from Box Office Mojo then goes into an interesting analysis of the admissions record:

All told, Avatar's estimated admission count is 60.7 million thus far, or less than Titanic through the same point (47 days in). It's also less than half of Titanic's 128 million total estimated admissions. Emphasizing the impressiveness of Avatar, it took such recent blockbusters as The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Spider-Man 2, The Passion of the Christ and Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith their entire runs to reach around 60 million admissions.

Only the money may matter to Hollywood, but attendance is important from an audience and cultural perspective. The disparity between Avatar and Titanic is so huge according to this method, that it is safe to say that Titanic sold a boatload more tickets.

Pointing out the estimated admissions in no way diminishes the box office achievement of Avatar. The purpose is to add perspective. There is no doubt that Avatar is a phenomenon in its own right with its own unique set of circumstances and that it stands as one of the greatest box office runs of all time.

Very interesting.  I guess it’s safe to say that no matter how high Avatar ends up pushing the grosses records, it won’t be able to pass Titanic in terms of attendance, although Avatar’s run has been so unstoppable that everything’s possible.

Personally, although Titanic was destined to be toppled sooner or later (and I’d rather see a movie like Avatar do it then a far less deserving summer blockbuster like a Shrek or Transformer rehash), it feels bittersweet because Titanic was on a completely different level in terms of the overall quality of the product.