Monday, January 25, 2010

Avatar Takes the "I'm the King of the World!" Crown

The Hollywood Reporter reports:

"Avatar" is the winner and new worldwide boxoffice champion.

After six rounds on the foreign circuit, "Avatar" is now the biggest-grossing film of all time, as earlier predicted.

Distributor 20th Century Fox said the James Cameron mega-budget blockbuster's worldwide cume -- excluding Puerto Rico -- was through the weekend just $2 million shy of "Titanic's" global boxoffice record of $1.843 billion. (Boxoffice in Puerto Rico, although generated offshore, is considered by Fox as part of its domestic total.)

The distributor confirmed that "Titanic's" historic benchmark fell as of early Monday.
The chart below shows the top ten grossing regions of the world and as can be seen, the breakdown of revenue for Avatar is much more broad and diverse than that of Titanic (take note of China and Russia).



With less dependence on a number of markets to date, this tells me that haven't seen anything yet. Boxoffice Guru projects total revenues of ~$700 million domestically and well north of $2 billion worldwide when all is done... I think that may be a low ball estimate.

Source: Box Office Mojo

4 comments:

  1. Great graph, as usual! James Cameron really got the Asian distribution system this time.

    I think you meant "~$700 million domestically", not "billion".

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  2. I'm always curious when I see charts like this, comparing totals from different time periods

    inflation-adjusted or not?

    They indicate that they try to account for this:

    http://www.boxofficemojo.com/about/adjuster.htm

    It looks like their sample chart of R movies:
    http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/domestic/mpaa.htm

    ...has the exorcist at $232.7MM which matches the "all-time" table entry for exorcist exactly, but only for domestic

    Makes me think they are being coy but it really is adjusted

    If so, Avatar is indeed the new winner, even in real terms

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