Avatar’s seven week reign as the box office champ ended this weekend and it wasn’t John Travolta and From Paris with Love that kicked the Na’vi in the groin. No, it was Dear John, the movie starring Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried, which is based on the Nicholas Sparks novel of the same name. Yes, the movie that’s currently boasting a 29 percent fresh rating on RottenTomatoes.com. Dear John took first place with an estimated $32.4 million and Avatar was next in line with $23.6 million. From Paris with Love was a distant third with a paltry $8.1 million and will most likely be forgotten come next weekend. One can only pray that Dear John will suffer the same.
Despite Avatar’s drop, it has made $630 million in eight weeks. If it wins the best picture Oscar on March 7th, you know the studio is going to milk every drop and get as much mileage from that victory as possible. I’ve shown that I suck at predicting the box office (since I was the one who said Avatar wouldn’t break the global or domestic box office grip of Titanic), but I have a feeling Avatar will settle in the record books somewhere near $695 million.
The first thing you should know about Crazy Heart – a simple yet searing portrait of a tired and broken country music artist named Bad Blake – is it will bring to Jeff Bridges (Iron Man) his first-ever Academy Award win out of five nominations over the last 40 years. You should also know if you live in Cache Valley and plan to see this movie, you’ll have to head south to Ogden, where it’s showing at the 
James Cameron must have a direct line to God or something, because the naysayers (including me) guffawed at the ballooned budget of 1997’s Titanic and predicted it would bomb at the box office. Instead, as we all know, Titanic became the worldwide and domestic box office champ, a record that’s held until today when, ironically, 
Rating the 2010 Super Bowl Trailers
This year’s commercials and trailers were ho-hum, except for the Google “Search On” ad (who thought you could tell a love story using a search engine in less than a minute?), the Doritos “House Rules” commercial and the Careerbuilder.com “Casual Friday” spot, the rest were either bizarre, unfunny or beyond stale (Bud Light, I’m talking to you). Even more glaring was the absence of trailers for Iron Man 2, The A-Team, Clash of the Titans, Toy Story 3, Shrek Forever After, Despicable Me and Tron: Legacy.
Here’s a rundown of the movie trailers shown during Super Bowl XLIV. Click the movie name to watch the preview.
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