FT Chronicle

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – After the seven-week reign of ‘Avatar’ at the weekend box office in North America on Sunday, the new romantic drama ‘Dear John’ finally topped through large numbers of young female moviegoers.

“Dear John” stars Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried as lovers whose romance is curtailed by the September 11 attacks. It is directed by Swedish filmmaker Lasse Hallstrom and based on “The Notebook,” a novel by Nicholas Sparks.

It grossed an estimated $32.4 million in the three-day period since opening Friday, said distributor Screen Gems, the low-budget division of Sony Corp..

It had hoped for an opening of about $20 million on a weekend when many Americans forsake movies to watch the Super Bowl, traditionally the year’s most-watched television broadcast. The football championship starts around 6:25 pm in Miami.

Audiences for the film were 84 percent female and two-thirds were under the age of 21, Sony said.

“Avatar” earned $23.6 million in its eighth weekend, taking its total to $630.1 million. James Cameron’s sci-fi blockbuster beat the $601 million haul of his 1997 release “Titanic” last Tuesday to become the biggest movie of all time in the United States and Canada.

The data are not adjusted for ticket-price inflation or for the higher cost of 3D engagements. The film was released by 20th Century Fox, a unit of News Corp.