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Weekend Box Office Results for December 25-27, 2009 - Box Office Mojo

Avatar ended up the winner for the weekend, although it lost some days along the way. The Chipmunk movie won its opening day (Wednesday) and Sherlock Holmes won its own opening period (Friday), but when all the dust had cleared it was Avatar comfortably on top for the weekend, raising its take to $212 million in 10 days. Avatar may have set the record for the best "second weekend" in history. Dark Knight holds that record at $75.2 million, and Avatar's preliminary estimate is $75.0, so that could go either way. Avatar now has the second-best December weekend in history AND the third-best (it only dropped 2% from last week.) That gives it two weekends better than any weekend ever accumulated by any of the Lord of the Rings films. That's pretty impressive.

By the way, Sherlock did pretty well his ownself. Sherlock Holmes had the fifth-best December opening in history! Oh, yeah, and the freakin' Chipmunks had the seventh-best December opening. That means the overall box office was 50% above last year's Christmas weekend.

Oh, yeah. Did I mention that it was the biggest weekend in history? Not just for December. For any month, including summer. The previous record was held by the summer weekend in which The Dark Knight opened, and this one beat that by ten million. Not only was this the best weekend in history, but November's New Moon opening weekend was the third-best weekend in history. Those two are BY FAR the top two non-summer weekends ever recorded. They came in at $264m and $250m. The previous record was only $179m. And the fourth-best non-summer weekend in history was New Moon's second week.

Recession, smecession! The movie industry seems counter cyclical. Measured by either dollars or ticket sales, this year is already 7-8% above last year with a few more days to go, and it did that with 15% fewer movies, meaning that the average per film is way the hell up! Total ticket sales had declined in five of the previous six years, but this year represented a significant reversal of that trend.