'Fellowship' Flush: 'Ring' Tops $200M

Jan. 7 -- Things keep looking better for The Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

In addition to winning the American Film Institute's first Best Picture of the Year Award this weekend, the fantasy epic led the box-office pack for the third time and crossed the $200 million threshold with no sign of slowing down.

The number-two movie was the Russell Crowe drama A Beautiful Mind, performing strongly in its first week of wide release. The melancholy comedy The Royal Tenenbaums, starring Gene Hackman, Ben Stiller and Gwyneth Paltrow, also did well as it hit more theaters, while Ali and Kate & Leopold began to give off more than a whiff of failure after their second week in the fray.

Rings is sure to soon overtake Rush Hour 2 as the most successful release in the history of its distributor, New Line Cinema — all it needs is another $20 million and change — and is likely to dominate the box-office for weeks to come in the face of anemic new movies (like Impostor, the Gary Sinise sci-fi turkey that finished an unlucky 13th this week) and December limited releases going wide (though in the latter division, Black Hawk Down could give the Hobbits a run for their money on the weekend of January 18).

Elsewhere on the list, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone cracked $300 million and became the 10th highest-grossing movie of all time, while Monsters Inc. enjoyed its 10th week in the top 10 and Jim Carrey's The Majestic seemingly fell off the face of the Earth by landing in the No. 12 spot. To put that in perspective, the low-budget stoner comedy How High (starring rappers Method Man and Redman) was released the same day as The Majestic and is now more than a million dollars ahead of the Carrey film, despite playing at about half as many theaters.

Andrew Johnston is a film critic and associate editor at US WEEKLY magazine.