‘Avatar’ sales reach the sky

We all saw it coming, but it’s still impressive that it happened so quickly. Only six weeks after release, “Avatar” is now the highest grossing film ever. It took “Titanic” 10 months to reach that spot. But hey, James Cameron is still the money-makingest director pretty much of all time, so he isn’t going to be needing same day payday loans any time soon,

As of yesterday,  “Avatar” had made $ 1.86 billion, compared with “Titanic’s” $ 1.84 billion all told. At the moment, “Avatar” still is making almost $ 2 million a day on weekends, so it still has time to add to it’s lead.

Revisionist history

Though “Avatar”is easily in the position of making the most money, the not-so-impressive part is that there is simply more money to be made nowadays because of ticket prices. “Gone with the Wind” has the record for most tickets sold, and it completely blows “Avatar” out of the water.

“Gone with the Wind” sold a ridiculous 202 million tickets, while “Avatar” has only sold 76 million. Of course, the fact that “Gone with the Wind” has been around for 70 years and re-shown in theaters periodically helps pad its number quite a bit. Also, when “Gone with the Wind” came out, people didn’t have nearly the selection to choose from that we have now.

Runners-up

The third highest-grossing film after “Avatar” and “Titanic” is “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” with $ 1.12 billion. Fourth is “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” with $ 1.07 billion, and fifth is “The Dark Knight” with $ 1 billion.

There’s one more hurdle Avatar has to pass, though. Though it doesn’t hold the worldwide record for grosses, “Titanic” still holds the record in the U.S. sales, grossing about $ 600 million. “Avatar” would need to sell another $ 45 million to catch up.