Can Avatar Top 500 Million at the Box Office?

James Cameron's long awaited film was finally released in theaters on December 18^th and its box office results look pretty impressive. Avatar silenced many of its negative critics by grossing nearly 80 million dollars over opening weekend. The captivating story from Cameron's Avatar was finally appreciated by moviegoers once they had realized that there was more to the movie than just the fancy CGI sceneries. I was quite skeptical of the movie once I saw the very first trailer that hit www.youtube.com few months ago. Judging by the trailer, I felt that the story was something that was done before by several other movies from the past, but when I gave the Avatar film a chance, I was very surprised. Anyway, this article is not about the movie, but about its box office numbers.

As odd as it may seem, Avatar garnered less cash domestically than it did internationally according to www.boxofficemojo.com. It looks like James Cameron has more fans in other countries than the USA, which really does not come as a surprise since he was born in Canada. The Canadian born director has had a very large international following for quite some time now and with the release of Avatar, that following may become even larger. As of December 28^th, 2009, Avatar has raked in over two hundred million dollars domestically and four hundred and sixty million dollars internationally. The domestic total is still rather impressive, but was expected to be more since it is in fact a James Cameron film. Cameron's last film was the legendary Titanic which was released way back in December of 1997.

There is a potential possibility that Avatar may become the fifth movie ever to gross over a billion dollars worldwide. The only films to ever do that were Titanic, Lord of the Rings 3, Pirates of the Caribbean 2, and the Dark Knight. Avatar has already collected six hundred million dollars at the box office as of today and it still has much time to reach a billion dollars by the middle of January. According to www.imdb.com, Avatar has received nearly a nine star average from over 75,000 users. Movies rarely receive an eight star average at the Internet Movie Database, but Avatar has clearly achieved that small goal.