The Town closes in on $100m worldwide

This blog is not given to much in the way of unseemly crowing about a film's box-office. No metric which rewards Transformers 2 and Alice in Wonderland so handsomely is entirely to be trusted, and yet we retain an unflinching respect for anything that smacks of that old Louis-B-Mayer instinct for the synchronous beating a million hearts — so it is strangely satisfying to see Ben Affleck's The Town do so well. Readers of this blog know how enthralled we were by Affleck's film, which seemed to us to hit a very small and precisely demarcated sweet-spot between the indie grit and 24-carot commercial gleam. A second viewing last weekend only served to cement our admiration, particularly for the performances of Lively, Renner and Postlethwaite. Now the film looks set to cross the $100m mark, world-wide.

Total Lifetime Grosses

Domestic:	$80,574,000	80.9%
+ Foreign:	$19,000,000	19.1%
= Worldwide:	$99,574,000

Not many films this year have made it to 100m while garnering the type of reviews picked up by The Town — just Inception, Toy Story 3, and possibly The Social Network. This blog spends much of its free time honing a principled disdain for Oscar predictions, and predictors, but has been known to break its own rule when occasion demands, and so hereby predicts that The Town will be the big surprise of the 2010 Oscar season, stunning everyone with the depth and breadth of its nominations: not just for best film but best director, supporting actor (Renner) and actress (Lively).