Weekend Receipts: Avatar Surpasses Dark Knight, Titanic, Thriller, Jesus

Join us now from Sundance as we offer a glance at the weekend's box office numbers, albeit through the fuzzy haze of enough complimentary Patron cocktails to kill an average sperm whale. Patron: Helping socially awkward, aspirant filmmakers get laid at heavily corporatized independent film festival parties since 2009™.

1. Avatar

Gross: $36,000,000 (Cume: $552,797,000)

Screens: 3,141 (PSA: $11,461)

Weeks: 6 (Change: -15.9%)

Fresh off its Golden Globes triumph, the box office behemoth known as Avatar steamrolled over the second-to-last formality in its path to being named the biggest-grossing movie of all time. It handily beat The Dark Knight's $533.3 million domestic gross, dipping just 16-percent, and has officially overtaken Titanic overseas, earning $1.28 billion. As Neytiri would say, "You're like a baby, making noise, don't know what to do." (Sorry -- nothing more apropo came to mind.)

2. Legion

Gross: $18,200,000 (new)

Screens: 2,476 (PSA: $7,351)

Weeks: 1

Critical reception wasn't kind, but Sony seems pleased with the performance of its Angels Vs. Demons Duke It Out at a Roadside Diner movie -- as do Paul Bettany's fans, who in his Uzi-toting, 12-packed Gabriel-with-a-bad-attitude see the actor finally achieving the promise he showed in his earlier work, like Wimbledon.

3. The Book of Eli

Gross: $17,000,000 (Cume: $62,003,000)

Screens: 3,111 (PSA: $5,464)

Weeks: 2 (Change: -48.2%)

Wall-scrambling, razor-toothed grannies not your thing? No problem! There was another post-apocalyptic offering in the cards this weekend: one in which Denzel Washington fights off gangs of outlaw marauders after his Amazon Kindle, the last known working digital-reading-device on Earth. Talk about shameless product placement.

4. The Tooth Fairy

Gross: $14,500,000 (new)

Screens: 3,344 (PSA: $4,336)

Weeks: 1

I honestly don't know where this went wrong. Perhaps it was the fact that it is called The Tooth Fairy, and it stars The Rock, but beyond that, I'm completely stumped. What they say is true -- in Hollywood, the only thing you know for certain is that nobody knows anything.

5. The Lovely Bones

Gross: $8,800,000 (Cume: $31,624,000)

Screens: 2,571 (PSA: $3,423)

Weeks: 7 (Change: -48.3%)

After showing some promise in its fifth week with a +44,129.0% increase in sales (Oprah must have mentioned she loves movies about murdered girls caught in Microsoft Vista screensavers), The Lovely Bones has fallen back to Earth. On a plus side, I could have sworn I saw the Salmon girl fighting off demons at a roadside diner this weekend. I swear! Dennis Quaid was there, too!