I wished USA, UK and all other countries wouldn't count gross earnings, but tickets or visitors - like FRA, GER, ESP, RUS and a few others do.

Anyway: James Cameron will soon be called the director who created the 2 most successful movies of all time.

It should beat Titanic, given what its done already (in terms of gross revenue, not tickets sold)

Its hold, worldwide, has been nothing short of Wii Play. It has had 3 weekends of ~200 million USD, worldwide.

I'd give it a 60% chance it beats Titanic. When IMAX/3D tickets cost >$14 worldwide, how could it not?

BTW, its cume stands at...

France ($21.3 million on the weekend for a $84.5 million)
Germany ($12.3 million, cume $57.2 million)
Spain ($10.1 million, cume $47.1 million)
U.K. ($9.3 million, cume $53 million)

I hope not!

France always amazes me when it comes to cinema, there's a reason it's called the country of cineasts.

Do you know who translates the visitors from other countries into gross earnings? The US tracking sites? I'm asking because no one in Germany ever reports gross earnings, but visitors instead - e.g. Avatar had 857.286 visitors ("Besucher" in the following link) and is currently at 2.344.676 visitors in Germany (  http://www.zelluloid.de/charts/index.php3 ).

Same with France, they report tickets ("entrées"): http://www.cinefeed.com/index.php/Box-office-cinema

Edit: nevermind

I doubt it will be able to beat Titanic because that movie just stayed in forever. like 258 days or something? (can't remember, but it was well over 2/3 of a year) To beat Titanic, Avatar will have to put up $800million more dollars. The following scenarios show how difficult this will be: (note that Avatar is currently averaging ~$58million/day worldwide)

Avatar will pass Titanic in:

13 days (January 17, 2010) @ $58 million/day or $406 million/week (the current rate; obviously this is unrealistic)

20 days (January 23, 2010) @ $40 million/day or $280 million/week (extremely unlikely)

27 days (January 30, 2010) @ $30 million/day or $210 million/week (imho this is the most optimistic scenario with a realistic possibility of occurring, but still unlikely)

32 days (February 4, 2010) @ $25 million/day or $175 million/week (not likely but possible)

40 days (February 13, 2010) @ 20 million/day or $140 million/week (maybe, but not very likely)

53 days (February 26, 2010) @ 15 million/day or $105 million/week (maybe)

80 days (March 25, 2010) @ 10 million/day or $80 million/week (definitely doable)

so actually, it might be able to pull it off after all.... we shall have to see how sales are affected by schoolkids going back to school this week to find out for sure though. Also, if you want to see the most successful films of all time by ticket sales, I recommend http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films_in_the_United_States_and_Canada though sadly both are only for the US and Canada

EDIT
Also, even given the price of tickets today, $1 billion is massive. Even at $12 dollars a ticket, Avatar would still have sold 84,800,000+ tickets worldwide. That's pretty impressive for any film ever, regardless of how much the tickets cost.