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...this mass-produced entertainment, came Avatar, the James Cameron sci-fi spectacular that has earned $350 million in its first 2½ weeks and, in about the same time, should overtake the Transformers sequel. It has already passed the billion-dollar mark at the worldwide box office (Transformers 2 topped out at $800 million), quickly becoming the fourth highest-grossing all-timer after the second Pirates of the Caribbean film, the final Lord of the Rings installment and, at the top, a little love story called Titanic. The ultimate face-off of Cameron vs. Cameron is still down the road...
Here are the top 10 films released in 2009, with the tally ending Dec. 31, and an asterisk denoting those pictures still playing in theaters...
Winners and Losers It happens - or was it inevitable? - that the top three winners were also the year's most expensive movies, costing between $210 million and $250 million, not including the cost of bringing them to market (usually another $100 million or so). Studio moguls are always looking for ways to tamp down runaway budgets, but they may have to acknowledge that money on the screen equals money in the bank often enough to take the risk. The worldwide popularity of these über-movies also suggests that smaller pictures will have a harder time getting made. That trend...
...example, a film may disappoint Stateside and be a hit abroad. Still, it's a Hollywood rule that movies with $100 million-plus budgets should at least earn as much at the domestic box office as they cost to produce. If they didn't in 2009, they made our top-of-the-flops list. The underperforming nine: Terminator Salvation, Disney's A Christmas Carol, G.I. Joe, Angels & Demons, Watchmen, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, Public Enemies, Land of the Lost and Where the Wild Things...
Note that, of the directors of these nine flops, four were either Academy Award winners (Robert Zemeckis, Ron Howard) or Oscar nominees (Michael Mann, Spike Jonze), whereas Cameron is the only Oscar winner among directors of the top 10 grossers. The lessons: prestige directors get to spend more money, and, in dollar terms, their "personal vision" can look astigmatic to the mass audience. (And great to critics, who put the Mann and Jonze films on their 10-best lists, and would rightly fret if big-budget assignments went only to hacks.) Consider, too, that none of the first seven...