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Call it a Super Bowl weekend upset, or proof of the law of diminishing returns -- or even the triumph of one love story over another. Whatever the explanation, Dear John, a young-adult weepie based on a novel by The Notebook's Nicholas Sparks, dethroned Avatar as king of the domestic box office, according to early studio estimates. The clear victory -- $32.4 million for Dear John to the sci-fi eco-epic's $23.6 million -- ends Avatar's weekend winning streak at seven. James Cameron's previous smash, Titanic, reigned for an astounding 16 consecutive weeks, from its opening in Dec. 1997 all the way through the late Mar. 1998 Oscar ceremony, where the waterlogged romance took home a record-tying 11 Academy Awards.
The strategy of the folks at Screen Gems -- the company that took on Dear John after New Line surrendered the property when the company it got folded into its parent, Warner Bros. -- was to open the movie on Super Bowl weekend, when American males, a big part of Avatar's constituency, were preoccupied with large men running, throwing and writhing in pain. Director Lasse Hallstrom, who had helmed such dewy fare as Chocolat, Something to Talk About and The Shipping News, gave the remaining femme audience the standard Harlequin cocktail of a handsome soldier (G.I. Joe's Channing Tatum), an idealistic gal (Amanda Seyfried, of Mamma Mia! and Big Love) and a big war (he reenlists after 9/11). That's how girls ran wild at the wickets, in the biggest Super Bowl weekend opening ever, with Dear John just topping the $31.1 million amassed two years ago by Miley Cyrus's Hannah Montana's concert movie.
The last time Avatar was not No. 1 in North American theaters was the weekend of Dec. 11-13, when the top spot went to the Disney animated feature The Princess and the Frog. That was another fish-out-of-water (or amphibian-in-the-bayou) love story: about a New Orleans girl hoping to build her dream restaurant but turned into a frog when she kisses a cursed prince; in Dear John the hero meets his sweetheart by diving into a lake to retrieve her purse. The sparks story has even more in common with Cameron's. In each picture, a U.S. soldier encounters a beguiling outsider with an affinity for green housing: Dear John's Savannah is building a Habit for Humanity; Avatar's Neyfiri is trying to protect her tribe's Tree of Souls. So for the past two months, the box office has been dominated by movies about strong women with a noble interest in real estate.
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