Over the past 13 weeks all the hyperbole in box-office circles has been reserved for Avatar, so it would be remiss not to praise the achievements of Alice in Wonderland. After less than two weeks in release, Disney's fantasy has already crossed $200m (£133m) in North America, becoming the first 2010 release to do so.
It is also single-handedly propping up the box office: thanks to Alice's commercial heft, box-office revenues are running about 9% ahead of the same period in 2009 – which, lest we forget, was a record year. Incidentally, combined with its international run, Alice has already amassed more than $420m worldwide.Summit's decision to re-release its multi-Academy Award winner The Hurt Locker is paying small dividends.
Because the movie has already completed its theatrical run and gone out on DVD, cinemas won't accommodate a wide release, ie more than 600 cinemas. However, nobody's grumbling about $828,000 from 349 venues. That puts Kathryn Bigelow's best picture winner on $15.7m. It's still the lowest grossing best picture winner since the dawn of time, but if it can get to $20m that would be a nice round number for financiers who think box-office grosses are all that matter.
The loser
Universal executives were expecting more from Green Zone than the $14.5m debut in second place. You'd think that the potent combination of Paul Greengrass and his Jason Bourne star Matt Damon would muster more than this, but it was always going to be a tough weekend with Alice still so fresh and several other new releases to choose from. Green Zone is a thrilling ride, and even though the protagonist's Bourne-like antics in the second half beggar belief, it deserves to prosper. As the only action thriller in release for a while, Green Zone has a chance to gain momentum. This week will be crucial as the movie heads into the second weekend and either thrives or dies on word of mouth. And it's brutal out there. Summit's romantic drama Remember Me, with the distributor's Twilight hero Robert Pattinson, crept out in fourth place on $8.3m and will also do well to keep going in a significant way, but this has more to do with the quality of the script than anything else. Also, does Pattinson amount to much on screen without Kristen Stewart? Time will tell.
The real story
Each year, Hollywood's lobby group, the Motion Picture Association of America, unleashes a volley of statistics designed to tell us how cinemagoing is the most affordable and magnificent pastime anybody could possibly contemplate, yielding ever-increasing revenues and profits for the distributors. We-ell, as we all know, that's not really the whole story. If it's true that the market can expand to accommodate more episodes of Harry Potter and Twilight and a second Avatar movie, it's also true that consumers are choosing to watch movies in different ways.
And that's where the MPAA's annual Theatrical Market Statistics Report, published last week, fails to tell the whole story. It tells us that ticket sales in North America in 2009 reached a record $10.6bn, while international and global revenues reached new highs of $19.3bn and $29.9bn. We learn that the average US ticket price climbed 4.4% to $7.50 and there were 1.42bn admissions, the first rise in two years and the highest level since 1.5bn five years earlier in 2004. 3D screens are booming all over the world, and 3D movies accounted for $1.14bn or 11% of that $10.6bn North American box office, with 20 3D movies coming out in 2009, compared with eight in 2008.
Nowhere does the MPAA adjust the figures for inflation, and nowhere do we learn about levels of consumption on VOD, cable, DVD and online. We know that repeat visits by moviegoers will turn a humble blockbuster into a glistening titan like Avatar, and indeed the report notes that "frequent filmgoers", defined as people who visit the cinema once a month or more and who currently make up 10% of the population in the US and Canada, accounted for half of all tickets sold in 2009. What the report doesn't say is how they were seeing movies when they weren't at the cinema. That's important, because once they can agree that cinemas and cable and VOD etc are all viable ways of consuming movies, maybe the studios can start to talk openly about the data.This may be the era of high-fidelity viewing, but the overall picture is murkier than ever.
The future
Next week brings an action comedy from Columbia called The Bounty Hunter, starring Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston – action comedies are notoriously difficult to pull off, so it's going to have to be very good indeed to stay afloat in the coming weeks. Fox has the comedy Diary of a Wimpy Kid, while Universal finally releases the action sci-fi Repo Men featuring Jude Law and Forest Whitaker.
North American top 10, 12-14 March
1. Alice in Wonderland, $62m. Total: $208.6m
2. Green Zone, $14.5m
3. She's Out of My League, $9.6m
4. Remember Me, $8.3m
5. Shutter Island, $8.1m. Total: $108m
6. Our Family Wedding, $7.6m
7. Avatar, $6.6m. Total: $730.3m
8. Brooklyn's Finest, $4.3m. Total: $21.4m
9. Cop Out, $4.2m. Total: $39.4m
10. The Crazies, $3.7m. Total: $34.2m
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