Mel Gibson and “Edge of Darkness” didn’t come within a light year of dethroning “Avatar” in its seventh weekend. The estimated $16 million take for the Warner Bros. release, slightly below expectations, was some $14 million south of the long-legged “Avatar,” which is expected to cross the $2 billion mark internationally this week. It’s hard to say whether the well-reviewed “Edge of Darkness” suffered from Gibson’s eight-year absence from movie screens, the 53-year-old actor’s anti-semitic rants, audience weariness with revenge thrillers, poor weather in much of the country, or some combination of the above. Third place went to the other wide newcomer, Disney’s dreadful, long-on-the shelf “When In Rome,” the first of a raft of pre-Valentine’s Day romances that opened to a better-than-expected (but still not great for such a pricey production) $12.5M. With next week bringing yet another revenge thriller (“From Paris, With Love”) with an aging star (Travolta) and a romantic drama (“Dear John”), things are looking good for Avatar and Fox to hold onto the box-office crown for an eight straight weekend. Meanwhile, with “Avatar” also closing in on the $600M mark domestically, we have the inevitable speculation about how much rising ticket prices — and advanced prices for 3-D showings — have contributed to the picture’s success. But trying to adjust for inflation using the Motion Picture Association of America’s average ticket price can be problematic, since truly reliable box-office figures only go back to 1983 or so. Nobody really knows how much the numbers for “Gone With The Wind,” “The Sound of Music” and “The Graduate,” to give three examples, were inflated by studio

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