Avatar laps the competition.

Wow.... just wow. This probably happened last week while I was busy with work and family obligations, but it bares stating none the less. If you look at the all-time worldwide box office chart, the third-highest grossing film of all time is The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King with $1.1191 billion. Avatar's current worldwide take is $2.3892 billion. That means that sometime last week, Avatar doubled the worldwide take of every other respective movie ever made, save for Titanic. It has currently tripled the worldwide take of every other movie outside the top-24 grossers worldwide (when it gets to $2.39 billion, it will have tripled #25 Shrek the Third). It has quadrupled the worldwide takes of every movie not in the top-50 all-time global gross list. Let me repeat that, in the 100+ years of cinema, there are only forty-nine movies that have grossed even a quarter of what Avatar has made in just 62 days. Click on the picture to watch the relatively engaging and intelligent interview that James Cameron gave with Charlie Rose last night. It's fun watching Cameron take on criticisms of Avatar point by point and render them more or less impotent. As for his comments regarding the Oscars, it's what I've been saying all along. Cameron's no dummy, he knows that he wins more if Bigelow wins Best Director for The Hurt Locker and Avatar wins Best Picture than if Cameron picks up both prizes. Or, we can just take him at his word that he genuinely wants Bigelow to win.

Scott Mendelson