Avatar Blockbuster Delivers

Published on Sunday, 20 December 2009 23:43 Written by Danny Miller

New York, Dec 20th (TradersHuddle.com) –James Cameron’s highly awaited Avatar opened this weekend at the box office and racked up a cool $230 million worldwide with the U.S. take at aprox. $73 million.

The U.S. take was slowed by a monster snow storm that pummeled the East Coast during the weekend. Big cities like New York, Philadelphia and Washington were under snow emergencies, reducing considerably the sales.

Even with depressed U.S. grosses, it was the best ever debut for director James Cameron, and best-ever opening for a 3D movie with IMAX (NASDAQ:IMAX) shattering their records and selling out every seat and adding shows to keep up with demand.

Avatar is playing in 3,542 total theaters in North America with 3D presentations at 2,038 sites accounting for almost 60% of the grosses. (Those 2,038 3D locations break down into 3,129 3D screens and 179 all 3D IMAX (NASDAQ:IMAX).

20th Century Fox is the studio behind Cameron’s latest gamble. The Director of Titanic blew past previous big budget films to create its latest movie. Cost estimates vary widely with some putting the production costs as high as $500 million. Fox and its parent company News Corp. (NASDAQ:NWS) have big stakes riding on the film, and the success or failure of the movie will certainly send seismic ripples throughout the film industry.

Avatar is certainly groundbreaking, the state-of-the-art 3D technology will help you get inversed in the world and promises to keep moviegoers fascinated with the tropical otherworld that Cameron created. The movie is said to contain about 3,000 special effects, with each one personally reviewed by the Director as he believes that the special effects will eventually turn out to be the stars of the film, maybe a reason why he avoided the big stars casting route.

20th Century Fox (NASDAQ:NWS) is counting on movie goers to pack the 3-D screenings, instead of the regular ones, in order to generate more revenue to cover the huge costs.

Remember, this is the biggest 3D release in movie history, spurred by the excitement surrounding Cameron's creation of the Fusion Camera System technology for photo-realistic computer-generated characters through motion capture animation. He wrote the script for Avatar back in the mid-1990s when he and Stan Winston co-founded Digital Domain. But when he took the screenplay to their special effects lab, Cameron was told it was just not possible to make the film with the current technology. So he sat on the project for more than a decade until there could be "several thousand 3-D

News Corp (NASDAQ:NWS), should not be the only one seeing benefits from the movie. Imax Corporation (NASDAQ:IMAX) can see an increase of sales from the movie, which is a perfect match for the large screen format presentation. Another stock that should see an up-tick from the movie is Mattel (NASDAQ:MAT), as the toy maker has its Avatar line in shelves just in time for last minute Christmas purchases.  Even McDonald’s (NYSE:MCD) should see a boost as the largest restaurant chain in the world, is including the Avatar toys in its happy meal offerings.