Less than two months after it was released, James Cameron's Avatar has now officially become the top grossing movie of all time. The film passed Titanic's $1.84bn global box office haul on Monday, with its current total standing at $1.843bn and growing. It's certain now that Avatar will be the first film to cross the $2bn mark at the global box office, and within two weeks at most, it should also have beaten Titanic's $600.8m take to become the biggest grossing film of all time in the US too.

The UK alone has added over $90m to the global pot, with France chipping in a cool $124.8m as the film's biggest non-US territory. Over two thirds of its money across the world seems to have come at 3D screenings, a factor that seems to have lots of people suddenly considering adding a 3D element to their own films past and future.

Of course, if you put Avatar side by side with Titanic on ticket sales alone, then it still trails the big boat by some distance. The average ticket price has risen more than 50% since Titanic was released, and then there's the premium levied on most 3D screenings of the film too to take into account. Adjust for inflation too and on US grosses, Avatar is about to overtake Grease and The Lion King, as it currently sits in 26th place.

However, countering that is the fact that most of the films that sit in the higher portions of the inflation-adjusted listed haven't been released in an era where films tend to get copied and uploaded to the Internet. That said, given the fact that most seem keen to see Avatar in 3D, then Hollywood may have found - albeit temporarily - a proper deterrent to piracy in 3D technology.

The competition facing Avatar over the coming weeks continues to be slight, and we suspect that James Cameron's movie has a lot of money to make yet before it starts its descent towards the DVD market....