Latest Avatar News

Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried’s Dear John has taken the top spot at the box office this week, knocking out Avatar from its seven-week reign.

Dear John took in an estimated $32.4 million this weekend, according to Variety, while Avatar took in $23.6 million.

Coming in third was John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers‘ From Paris With Love.

What did YOU catch in theaters this weekend?

James Cameron’s Avatar has surpassed Titanic at the box office!

The film has made more than $1.8 billion worldwide, besting Titanic’s record from 1997, CBS reports.

However, Avatar is still far from the inflation-adjusted record set by Gone with the Wind in 1939 - in today’s money, it took in the equivalent of about $6 billion.

“[James] has so much respect for the audience and the individual theater-goer, he wanted to give them the story he dreamed of seeing when he was 14,” Avatar star Sigourney Weaver told CBS.

DO YOU THINK Avatar could take in $6 billion at the box office and overtake Gone with the Wind?

With Avatar making over $1 billion at the box office, director James Cameron is thinking about how best to bring the Na’vi back to the big screen for the next installment.

Sam Worthington has already signed on for the sequel, EW reports, and James is already dreaming up ideas for the second Avatar film. Here’s what he had to share with EW:

On proving people wrong: “Let me put it this way. All of those naysayers, the nattering nabobs of negativity, the people who were saying that the movie looked bad before they had even seen anything – you have to learn to ignore them. That’s something that I learned on Titanic. But yeah, it’s satisfying that I was able to prove them all wrong.”

On planning ahead for future movies: “I’ve had a story line in mind from the start – there are even scenes in Avatar that I kept in because they lead to the sequel. It just makes sense to think of it as a two-or-three-film arc, in terms of the business plan. The CG plants and trees and creatures and the musculoskeletal rigging of the main characters – that all takes an enormous amount of time to create. It’d be a waste not to use it again.”

On what he did on opening weekend: “Some people treat opening weekends like Election Day. They stare at the computer screen and watch the numbers change. I don’t. I go away. I just went off and stared at the fire and read some books. I can disconnect like that.”

For more on Avatar, check out EW, on newsstands Friday (January 15)!