Quotes of the Day

The New Year's films starring Nicolas Cage and Gwyneth Paltrow, Oscar winners from another millennium, could not derail the top Christmas holdovers. True Grit ($15 million) finally overtook Little Fockers ($13.8 million) for the No. 1 position this weekend at the North American box office, according to early studio reports. Cage's medieval mishmash, Season of the Witch, landed in third place, with $10.8 million, while Country Strong, Paltrow's sex-change version of Crazy Heart, was sixth with $7.3 million. Crazy Heart star Jeff Bridges showed double power with moviegoers this weekend, starring in True Grit as well TRON: Legacy, which finished fourth with $9.8 million.

Many slots in the weekend's list were filled with pictures hoping to contend for this year's Academy Awards. Black Swan, the ballet freak-show starring Best Actress sure-shot Natalie Portman, continued its en-pointe march toward Oscar Night, grossing $8.35 million at a mid-level 1,584 theaters for a six-week total of $61.5 million — quite a haul for a film that cost only $13 million to make. That royal talk-show The King's Speech, with Best-Actor Oscar favorite Colin Firth as the stammering King George VI, did even better, screen for screen, amassing $6.8 million at just 758 theaters; the Weinstein Company inspirational had a production budget of just $15 million and has taken in $33.3 million so far. Another of Weinstein's Oscar hopefuls, the domestic drama Blue Valentine, collected $719,000 at a mere 40 theaters, for the weekend's highest per-screen average.

On a sleepy weekend, with total revenue down 17% from the same frame last year, Hollywood's money-counters prefer to look back to the satisfying stats of the previous year. We'll get to them in a moment. But first, here are the Sunday estimates of this weekend's top-grossing pictures in North American theaters, as reported by Box Office Mojo:

1. True Grit, $15 million; $110.4 million, third week
2. Little Fockers, $13.8 million; $124 million, third week
3. Season of the Witch, $10.7 million, first week
4. TRON: Legacy, $9.8 million; $147.9 million, fourth week
5. Black Swan, $8.35 million; $61.4 million, sixth week
6. Country Strong, $7.3 million; $7.4 million, third week
7. The Fighter, $7 million; $57.8 million, fifth week
8. The King's Speech, $6.81 million; $33.3 million, seventh week
9. Yogi Bear, $6.81 million; $75.6 million, fourth week
10. Tangled, $4.75 million; $175.9 million, seventh week

THE YEAR IN REVIEW

Last year's domestic box office stayed in a profitable lull: according to Paul Dergarabedian at Hollywood.com, the total take in domestic theaters was $10.57 billion, just off the record $10.6 billion in 2009. Attendance was another, sadder story, dropping 5.24% from 1.421 billion tickets sold to 1.346 billion; that's the second lowest total in 14 years — only the 2008 tally was worse. The revenue for the summer of 2010 was the lowest in five years; and for the Nov.–Dec. holiday season, attendance was down 18% from last year.

Fortunately for the U.S. film industry, people watch movies abroad too — our movies. Dergarabedian notes that foreign grosses rose by $2 billion, to $17.6 billion, accounting for 62% of the worldwide total. And there was virtually no difference between the top-grossing movies in North American theaters and those abroad. What's popular here is popular there. No film from Europe or Asia could match the appeal of the big-studio product. Hollywood rules the world.

Let's look at the list of top-grossing films released last year in North American theaters, again per Box Office Mojo, with each movie's MPAA rating:

1. Toy Story 3, rated G, $415 million
2. Alice in Wonderland, PG, $334.2 million
3. Iron Man 2, PG-13, $312.4 million
4. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, PG-13, $300.5 million
5. Inception, PG-13, $292.6 million
6. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I, PG-13, $287.7 million (still in theaters)
7. Despicable Me, PG, $251.4 million (still in theaters)
8. Shrek Forever After, PG, $238.8 million
9. How to Train Your Dragon, PG, $217.6 million
10. The Karate Kid, PG, $176.6 million

Since the books still aren't closed on the 2010 releases that are still in theaters, and since the Disney animated feature Tangled is currently less than a million dollars below The Karate Kid's total, it will likely push the Jaden Smith–Jackie Chan vehicle out of the top 10 by mid-week. But Tangled may itself be evicted from the 10-spot if TRON: Legacy or Little Fockers or True Grit shows sustained muscle. The films in the one-to-nine slots should hold.

Ten lessons from 2010:

• Most of the films that made a lot cost a lot; only Despicable Me ($69 million) had a budget under $100 million. In 2009, three mid-budget movies made the top 10.

• Why bother trying something new? Sequels and remakes again dominated, with Inception the only original live-action film in the top 10. And Toy Story 3's first-place finish means that, for eight of the last nine years, a sequel has been the top-grossing film. The one exception: Avatar.

• Oh, Avatar, Hollywood misses you so. If you were to divide the revenue of the all-time top-grossing movie into the money earned in the two weeks after its release in December 2009 ($283.6 million) and then its play-out in all of 2010 ($466.1 million), James Cameron's eco-epic would be the fourth-best earner of 2009 and the absolute winner of 2010.

• There are no more movie stars. Yes, Johnny Depp helped sell Alice In Wonderland, but he and Angelina Jolie together couldn't make a hit of The Tourist (though it has earned $100 million abroad). Leonard Di Caprio was the front man for Inception, and his Shutter Island collaboration with Martin Scorsese was a midsize success, but those were the actor's first $100-million domestic grossers since 2006. Hollywood is deep into its first-ever post-star era.

• A megahit movie is bigger than ever. In the 100 years of feature films, only seven pictures have topped the $1 billion mark worldwide. Three did so last year: Avatar, Alice in Wonderland and Toy Story 3.

• The 3-D fad may have abated as 2010 wore on — with some films made in (or converted to) the process flopping, and directors and the more observant moviegoers increasingly resistant to the distorting and darkening of the screen image — but 3-D had wide appeal, especially abroad. So you can expect to wear goggles at big films for another while yet.

• It was a year of movies for kids. Toy Story 3 is the first G-rated film to be the year's top-grosser since 1995's — wait for it — Toy Story. And for the first time in a quarter-century, six of the top 10 films (whether the last place is taken by The Karate Kid or the PG Tangled) were rated G or PG, replacing the previously favored PG-13.

• Cartoons forever! If Tangled nabs the No. 10 slot, 2010 will be the first year with five animated features in the top 10.

• All these PG hits meant that no guy comedy made the top 10; Adam Sandler (Grown Ups), Will Ferrell (The Other Guys), Johnny Knoxville (Jackass 3D) and the bromance Due Date all finished out of the money.

• Grownup women lost out too. The only top-10 films with female leads were Alice in Wonderland, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse and Tangled, where the three heroines were teenagers. No Blind Side this year.

So what does the recent past teach us about the future? Essentially, that nothing will change. Movies will be jack-in-the-box pop-out toys for kids; adults will be their children's in-theater babysitters, because there's nothing for them to see; and virtually all the big films will be remakes or sequels of stuff we've already seen.

Happy moviegoing, everyone!

• Richard Corliss