Avatar kicks butt at Box-office, Sherlock holmes gets close and… Chipmunks


I’m not usually one to post weekend box office charts at the movies, but it would seem this weekend’s huge numbers seem to beg for attention. Avatar, being the huge hype monster it is, reigned supreme this weekend beating out Guy Ritchie’s action packed look at Sherlock Holmes, but not by a lot. Oh yeah, and the Squeakquel did well too, ick.

1 Avatar (2009) $75M $212M
2 Sherlock Holmes (2009) $65.4M $65.4M
3 Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel (2009) $50.2M $77.1M
4 It’s Complicated (2009) $22.1M $22.1M
5 Up in the Air (2009/I) $11.8M $24.5M

Avatar cannot be stop with it’s over 200 million domestic gross, but prior to Sunday Sherlock Holmes was barely beating out Avatar, only to be knocked back to the second spot.

Being the curious person I am, I wanted to see what last year’s numbers looked like around this time compared to this year’s. The top five were Marley and Me, Bedtime Stories(WHY ADAM WHY?), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Valkyrie and Yes Man. The combined gross for the Christmas weekend in 2008 is 128.5 million. A hefty amount, but rather insignificant considering this weekend’s combined total is almost 100 million larger.

While this could result in studios releasing more big scale films during the summer and the winter, I don’t quite see it happening. Avatar was a movie of extremely large proportions, with a 150 million put towards the advertising alone, leading to the grand acceleration from last week to this week, a likely result of return customers. It does, however, make me wonder on how there’s such a grand success of movies such as Sherlock Holmes and Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, who had considerable less advertising.

In either case, I would think we’ll see much of a repeat next week with… well nothing really new out. Perhaps not the same numbers, but at the very least likely the same top three sitting proudly where they are now. I plan to see The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which I don’t quite expect to see anywhere near the top 10.

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