Avatar

Avatar

James Cameron has did it again. Once scored super big with Titanic, the senior director presents his latest work, Avatar.

The science fiction epic with 3-D is now sit at the top of worldwide box office during its first weekend even as North American sales were hit by an enormous snow storm. It sits at the highest rank with $73 million domestically and $159.2 million overseas, for a $232.2 million worldwide total.

The awesome figures covered North America and 106 foreign markets, according to News Corp’s 20th Century Fox, provisionally the ninth-biggest opening of all time. It’s slightly ahead of 2006′s The Da Vinci Code ($232.1 million) among worldwide openings. And if the number is confirmed when final data are issued on Monday, Avatar will set a new opening record for a nonsequel.

Avatar, one of the most expensive movie ever made, was set in the 22nd century, with stars Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana in a story of a human-alien conflict on a distant moon. It follows a disabled ex-Marine that was sent from Earth to infiltrate an alien race of 10-foot (3 meter)-tall blue people in order to save his polluted planet.

This is Cameron’s first dramatic feature since 1997′s Titanic, the biggest film of all time before accounting for inflation. Cameron spent the intervening years waiting for moviemaking technology to catch up with his vision for the follow-up. Production took two years.

More facts from the numbers: among this year’s openers, Avatar‘s weekend ranks as the sixth-biggest, behind Star Trek, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and, at No. 1, New Moon, which successfully get nearly $143 million.

Here’s the list of weekend’s top-grossing films based on Friday-Sunday estimates as compiled by Exhibitor Relations:

  1. Avatar, $73 million
  2. The Princess and the Frog, $12.2 million
  3. The Blind Side, $10 million
  4. Did You Hear About the Morgans?, $7 million
  5. The Twilight Saga: New Moon, $4.4 million
  6. Invictus, $4.2 million
  7. Disney’s A Christmas Carol, $3.4 million
  8. Up in the Air, $3.1 million
  9. Brothers, $2.6 million
  10. Old Dogs, $2.3 million

Congrats again, Avatar, and a big applause for James Cameron!