Box office report: It’s all about “Avatar”

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:12:00 +0000

This is almost getting boring. Yes, "Avatar" grossed $48 million this weekend, crushing the fourth-weekend record ("Spider-Man" and "Titanic" both grossed $28 million in their fourth weekends). Yes, it dropped a mere 29 percent in its first non-holiday weekend. Yes, it's now at $429 million, the seventh-biggest domestic grosser of all time in just under a month. And no, it probably won't be slowing down as next weekend is another holiday weekend, so we can expect to see another sub-30 percent drop. By the end of Martin Luther King day weekend, it'll likely surpass "Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace" ($431 million), "ET: The Extra Terrestrial," "Shrek 2" ($441 million) and "Star Wars" ($461 million) to become the third-biggest domestic grosser of all time. So at this point, the only questions remaining are whether it can surpass the $533 million gross of "The Dark Knight" (probably) and the $600 million gross of Titanic (possibly, especially if Oscar smiles accordingly). With $1.33 billion in the worldwide bank, it is just over $500 million away from breaking "Titanic's" seemingly unsinkable $1.8 billion record. You can babble on about inflation all you want, but at the rate this thing is going, it could very well break both of "Titanic's" records and just keep on going. Because, I've never ever seen legs and constancy like this, not since "Titanic." Whichever movie eventually takes "Avatar" out of the top spot will likely become the answer to a trivia question, just like "Lost in Space."

“Daybreakers”: Another day, another vampire saga

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 19:09:00 +0000

"Daybreakers" takes place in a world that's been overrun by vampire movies --- I mean vampires. And it's clear enough that the filmmakers, the twin-brother writer-director team Peter and Michael Spierig, have tried to bring some spark of originality to the modern-day vampire genre, which, between "True Blood," the "Twilight" series, and a forthcoming American remake of the Swedish child-vampire film "Let the Right One In," sometimes really does seem to have taken over the world.

In "Daybreakers," Ethan Hawke plays Edward Dalton, a hematologist vampire (with a conscience) who's desperately trying to find a substitute for human blood. The problem, you see, is that now that the world is populated mostly by vampires with the gift of everlasting life, humans are an endangered species and their blood is in short supply. Edward doesn't much like being a vampire -- he was "turned" by his brother, Frankie (Michael Dorman), a soldier in the vampire military -- and so when he meets a band of survivor humans who just may have found a way to turn vampires back into regular folk again, he agrees to help.

Salon.com > Daybreakers

Box office report: It’s all about “Avatar”

“Daybreakers”: Another day, another vampire saga