New York City, Dec 28 (THAINDIAN NEWS) The 3-D epic movie Avatar, didn’t sink like a titanic, instead it rose like a phoenix and broke all box-office records. The director of another record-breaking movie ‘Titanic’, James Cameron has also directed Avatar and it is also shattering the box office collections worldwide. In just 10 days of release Avatar has made over $212 million in just the US.

By conservative estimates the worldwide collection of Avatar could easily be over $1 billion. The opening weekend collection was $77.4 million and in the next weekend it was $75 million, which is just a miniscule drop of 3% from the opening weekend. Blockbusters typically drop 30-50 percent in the second weekend.

“This thing is going to be playing and playing, I can tell you that,” said Bert Livingston, 20th Century Fox distribution executive. “There’s a lot of business out there. Everybody’s got good movies out.” In addition to “Avatar,” the Christmas weekend included the release of “Sherlock Holmes,” which brought in $65.4 million in the U.S.

During the Christmas weekend the Americans spend over $278 million on movie tickets over the past three days broke the previous weekend record of $260.8 million set in July 2008, when “The Dark Knight” was released, according to Hollywood.com.