Oh yeah, it's that big a deal...

Yeah, I had a feeling I didn't need to rush to do that 8th week @ #1 jpeg! Well, folks, the unthinkable finally happened... at the box office this week.
Avatar was finally rousted from its throne atop the Box Office pile. It doesn't really matter what beat it... and you might ask, why is that, The Movie Hooligan? Because no one's telling the other half of the story, that's why! But I'm doing my due diligence as an unpaid reporter. I went to Variety.com, where you can apparently find the box office tallies for every week in history! Oh, things are just getting worse and worse for James Cameron and company, I tells ya. Why, back in 1997-1998, Titanic was #1 for much, much longer than Avatar! Why, this time 12 years ago, Titanic beat The Replacement Killers for the #1 spot! Followed by Good Will Hunting at #3, Blues Brothers 2000 at #4, and As Good As It Gets rounding out the Top 5. I like Variety because they do the top 100 or so. Spice World dropped to #7 that week, for those of you who were wondering. The week of 3/13-19/1998, Titanic was STILL #1, and Leonardo DiCaprio's Man in the Iron Mask debuted strong at #2... but not quite strong enough. It missed out by about $300,000. And then the week of 3/20-26/'98, Titanic beat Primary Colors for the #1 spot again! This is interesting stuff. Big Lebowski was already at #10. Well, it would take the stoners some time to get to the theater... better to just wait for the DVD. The week of 3/27 - 4/2/'98, Titanic dealt a double blow to Barbarino by beating a re-release of Grease AND Primary Colors for the #1 spot. No, it was April Fool's weekend 1998 when the then new Lost in Space finally took down the Titanic. Apparently, there was a couple even cuter than DiCaprio and Winslet, and that was the duo Heather Graham and ... Matt LeBlanc? Well, half-cuter, anyway. Titanic sank to #2 in that conflagration, and the week after it got even worse: #3, #4, back up to #3, #6, #4, #7, #7, #9, #7, ... this is getting crazy! #10, #13, #18, #16, #19, #13, #14, #16, #18, #18, #22... Finally! The 20s. This was the week of August 21-27, 1998. #34, #47, #50, #72, #96, ... and finally, October 2nd, 1998, it drops to below 116, just after Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life. I'm assuming it didn't make a comeback; the prints probably broke too many times after that.
Anyway, what debuts do we have this week? Well, there's Dear John at #1. Another damn Nicholas Sparks romantic movie. Then there's Crazy Heart. Well, I hope that by making money it doesn't ruin its chances at the Oscars. And finally, From Paris with Love... Luc Besson has to be stopped. Congress must pass a law banning any future Luc Besson productions from these tired shores. That's as far as I'll go with that.