Jennifer Jones, who achieved Hollywood stardom in “The Song of Bernadette” and other films of the 1940s and ’50s while gaining almost as much attention for a tumultuous personal life, died Thursday at her home in Malibu, Calif. She was 90.

Ms. Jones, who was the chairwoman of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif., died of natural causes, said Leslie Denk, a museum spokeswoman. Ms. Jones was the widow of the industrialist and art patron Norton Simon.

After winning an Academy Award in 1944 for her performance in “The Song of Bernadette,” Ms. Jones went on to star in successful films like “Duel in the Sun” and “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing.” She was nominated for Oscars five times.

She was also known for an off-screen life that included bouts of emotional instability; a second marriage to the Svengali-like David O. Selznick, the producer of “Gone With the Wind”; the suicide of their daughter; and a later marriage to another larger-than-life figure, Mr. Simon.

It was Selznick who got Ms. Jones the role of Bernadette Soubirous, the young French peasant girl whose visions at Lourdes created a sensation in 1858. “The Song of Bernadette,” based on Franz Werfel’s best-selling novel, was a huge hit, and it brought the little-known Ms. Jones instant fame.

“After that first big role, there was a kind of stage fright,” Ms. Jones said in 1981. She told another interviewer: “When you’re young, you’re full of hope and dreams. Later you begin to wonder. I did ‘The Song of Bernadette’ without knowing what was going on half the time.”

When she made “Bernadette,” Ms. Jones was the wife of the young actor Robert Walker and the mother of two small boys. She and her husband had met as students at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York in 1938 and married a year later. They had struggled together until Selznick put Ms. Jones under personal contract in 1941. A year later, Mr. Walker was signed by MGM and had a star-making debut in 1943 as a young sailor in “Bataan.”

But the marriage didn’t last; they separated in the fall of 1943, and by then Ms. Jones was deeply involved with Selznick. Seventeen years her senior, he would be the mastermind of her career.

Selznick’s wife, Irene, the daughter of the movie mogul Louis B. Mayer, left him in 1945, in part over his affair with Ms. Jones, who divorced Mr. Walker that year. David Thomson, in his biography of Selznick, “Showman,” said Selznick had found something special in Ms. Jones. “She was so meek, so young, so lovely, so entirely ready to be David’s creation that she left all the responsibility with him,” Mr. Thomson wrote.

Ms. Jones and Selznick were married in 1949 on a yacht off the coast of Italy. Until his death in 1965, he made virtually all the decisions in his wife’s career. He supervised her dramatic training and produced many of her early movies, including “Since You Went Away” (1944), “Duel in the Sun” (1946), “Portrait of Jennie” (1948) and a lavish version, the second, of Ernest Hemingway’s “Farewell to Arms” (1957). The film, which also starred Rock Hudson, was a critical and box-office failure and the last movie Selznick made.

When Selznick lent his wife out to other producers, he often chose badly — turning down the classic film noir “Laura,” for example, or insisting that she star as the mentally ill Nicole Diver in the film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night” when she was both too old for the role and in precarious mental health herself.

Ms. Jones never set her own course. Though her roles expanded — from the country girl Bernadette to the passionate half-caste young woman lusting after Gregory Peck in “Duel in the Sun” to the wealthy adulteress of Vittorio De Sica’s “Indiscretion of an American Wife” (1954) — the screen image was always as molded by Selznick.

But her acting was admired. She received Oscar nominations as best actress for her performances as an amnesiac cured by Joseph Cotten’s love in “Love Letters” (1945), as the wanton Pearl Chavez in “Duel in the Sun” and as a Eurasian doctor in love with a Korean War correspondent (William Holden) in “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” (1955).

Ms. Jones was born Phylis Lee Isley in Tulsa, Okla., on March 2, 1919, the only child of Philip and Flora Mae Isley. Her parents owned and starred in the Isley Stock Company, a tent-show theatrical troupe that toured the rural Midwest. As a child she spent her summers taking tickets, selling candy and acting in the company.

After a year at Northwestern University, she moved to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she was cast as Elizabeth Barrett opposite Robert Walker’s Robert Browning in “The Barretts of Wimpole Street.” The two soon married, and on their honeymoon in 1939 they went to Hollywood, where they found bit roles.

Retreating to New York, the couple had a son, Robert Jr., in 1940, and another, Michael, less than a year later. Michael died in 2007. Robert survives her, as do eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Ms. Jones met Selznick in New York when she went to his office there to read for the lead in “Claudia,” Rose Franken’s hit stage play, which Selznick was turning into a movie. The title role went to Dorothy McGuire, who had starred in the play, but Selznick was taken by the lithe, dark-haired Ms. Jones and saw a future for her in Hollywood. (He came up with the name Jennifer Jones during that first encounter.)

Ambitious but emotionally fragile, Ms. Jones placed herself in Selznick’s hands. He cast her in a William Saroyan play, “Hello Out There,” in a theater season he was presenting in Santa Barbara, Calif., and she received rave reviews. He was already planning to lend her to his brother-in-law, the producer Bill Goetz, at 20th Century Fox, for “Song of Bernadette.”

After “Bernadette,” Selznick cast her as Claudette Colbert’s daughter in “Since You Went Away,” his bid to make a “Gone With the Wind” about the World War II home front. Ms. Jones was nominated for a supporting actress Oscar as the girl whose first love is a young soldier.

Though Ms. Jones and Mr. Walker were by then estranged, Selznick cast Mr. Walker as the soldier who is strengthened by Ms. Jones’s love. Mr. Walker, who later scored a success as the villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train,” died at 32 in 1951 after years of emotional problems and drinking, which he attributed to his loss of Ms. Jones.

Among Ms. Jones’s other movies were the comedy “Cluny Brown” (1946), directed by Ernst Lubisch; “Carrie” (1952), a film version of Theodore Dreiser’s novel “Sister Carrie” co-starring Laurence Olivier; John Huston’s “Beat the Devil” (1954) co-starring Humphrey Bogart; “Madame Bovary” (1949), co-starring James Mason; and “Ruby Gentry” (1952), a King Vidor film with Charlton Heston about destructive passions reminiscent of “Duel in the Sun.”

After Selznick’s death in 1965, Ms. Jones’s film career petered out in “The Idol” (1966), about a young man sleeping with the mother of his girlfriend; the low- budget “Angel, Angel, Down We Go” (1969); and the ensemble disaster movie “The Towering Inferno” (1974). In 1966 she made a rare stage appearance, in a revival of Clifford Odets’s “Country Girl” at New York City Center.

In 1967, Ms. Jones made headlines when she swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills and was discovered, near death, lying in the surf at Malibu. In 1976, Ms. Jones’s 21- year-old daughter, Mary Jennifer Selznick, jumped to her death from a building in West Los Angeles.

Ms. Jones married Norton Simon, in 1971, in a ceremony on a yacht in the English Channel after a courtship of three weeks. Mr. Simon, a multimillionaire industrialist who had turned a bankrupt orange juice bottling plant into a conglomerate that included Hunt Foods and Canada Dry, had retired in 1969 at 62 to concentrate on collecting art.

He spent more than $100 million on his collection, one of the country’s greatest private art collections, housed at the Norton Simon Museum.

After being stricken by the paralyzing neurological disorder Guillain-Barré syndrome, Mr. Simon resigned as president of the museum and was succeeded by Ms. Jones, who also took the title of chairwoman. She oversaw a gallery renovation by the architect Frank Gehry. Mr. Simon died in 1993 at age 86.

Throughout her life Ms. Jones appeared shy and aloof in public, and she rarely gave interviews. She explained why in one of the few she did give, in 1957.

“Most interviewers probe and pry into your personal life, and I just don’t like it,” she said. “I respect everyone’s right to privacy, and I feel mine should be respected, too.”

James Cameron’s long-awaited and highly anticipated 3-D sci-fi epic Avatar opens this Friday. This week, we’ll be looking at everything that went into creating the polarizing movie, which some are calling a revolution in filmmaking and others are calling Smurfs Reloaded. Today, Ben Kaplan looks at the women in James Cameron’s movies and his life.

James Cameron has been married five times but, as one of his friends put it to Dana Goodyear, a Los Angeles-based journalist who spent more than a year with the Avatar director gathering material for a recent profile in The New Yorker, “He basically married every woman that he wanted to have sex with.”

His friend hadn’t meant to imply that the filmmaker was running around like Federico Fellini or Tiger Woods. Cameron simply married so often because he had grand ambitions: There was no time for courtships, so he just married the women he liked.

“He’s not much of a relaxer,” Goodyear told the Post. She offers an insight about the archetypal female heroines who have shot up Cameron films ranging from Terminator to Aliens to Zoe Saldana’s turn this weekend in Avatar: They may all be based on his mom.

“He talked about her all the time,” Goodyear says of the stock car-racing, Canadian Women’s Army Corps-volunteering Shirley Cameron, who was taught, blindfolded, how to assemble a gun. “His mother was the free spirit of the family, the renegade, and he may be emulating those qualities in his films.”

Like the man, Cameron’s films seem to have an uneasy relationship with women. On one hand, says Dana Polan, professor of cinema studies at New York University, the director gives the world strong female characters. However, the women usually commence their ass-kicking in tight T-shirts and generally only find their reservoir of strength after being empowered by men.

“Cameron loves the strong feisty heroine, but he strips them down and makes them as vulnerable as possible, as sexy possible, before he has them kicking ass,” says Polan, who credits Cameron’s early years with the Roger Corman school of exploitation filmmaking with influencing his later, big-budget pictures. “Really, it’s an old trope of action cinema – a woman in a nightgown is tied to the rails – that plays to the fantasies of the male spectator. It’s empowering women, but it’s still an empowered woman in tight leather pants.”

Whether it’s Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, his ex-wife Linda Hamilton in Terminator, Kate Winslet in Titanic or even Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies, Cameron’s heroines have always combined toughness with sex appeal. Many female action heroes do. There’s no denying that Quentin Tarantino made an icon of Uma Thurman with Kill Bill, but like Carrie-Anne Moss in The Matrix or Angelina Jolie in the Tomb Raider films, Cameron’s heroines don’t exactly scream gender equality.

“Given his macho recreational pursuits, Cameron would seem to be the kind of person who’d surround himself with men – and his motorcycle buddies are Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Arnold – but he’s consistently worked with female producers, writers and female executives,” says Goodyear, who points out that his ex-wife, Kathryn Bigelow, who Cameron is competing against this year for the best director Golden Globe, sent him her first draft of her screenplay for The Hurt Locker. “It seems clear to me he has a profound respect for women. He has very egalitarian sets.”

Cameron has been married to his current wife, the actress Suzy Amis, for the past nine years, and together they have three children. But whatever stability his new wife may have provided, the director’s work with women seems to remain unchanged. “Zoe Saldana proves her mettle as yet another kick-ass Cameron heroine,” Variety magazine wrote in an early review of Avatar. Of course, given that Saldana may be playing a giant blue alien version of Cameron’s mother, that may or may not prove to be a good thing

Apple Inc has acquired digital music service Lala, as the dominant online music retailer explores new models for selling songs.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed by Apple, which confirmed the purchase on Friday.

ITunes is the leading music service in the United States with more than 70 percent of all digital music sales and it is the leading music retailer overall.

But newer music streaming services from the likes of News Corp’s MySpace Music and Spotify have begun to win over music fans in the last year.

“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not comment on our purpose or plans,” Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said.

A source familiar with the matter said the iPod, iPhone and Mac maker is seeking new ways to expand iTunes to move it beyond being a predominantly download service for songs. The source asked not to be named.

“Apple recognizes that the model is going to evolve into a streaming one and this could probably propel iTunes to the next level,” said the person.

The iTunes store offers more than 11 million songs. Apple has sold billions of tracks through iTunes since its launch in 2003.

The Lala service allows users to stream from the Internet any tune in its catalog of more than 8 million songs once for free, and then sells unlimited streams for 10 cents per track and MP3 downloads starting at 79 cents.

The Palo Alto, California-based company’s investors include Bain Capital Ventures, Ignition Partners and Warner Music.

Lala founder Bill Nguyen said in October his company’s revenues total less than $10 million. He said the company had about 100,000 customers.

Internet search giant Google Inc recently partnered with Lala to provide users song samples along with links to purchase the music.

Lala has also partnered with Facebook to offer music through the social networking site

Movie flops aren’t just about losing money. Yes, big budgets that go bust are one consideration. But flops are also about lofty expectations dashed and high profiles brought low. They trigger embarrassing catcalls from the peanut gallery and a general whoever-thought-that-was-a-good-idea-in-the-first-place bewilderment.

Any judgments of flopitude are necessarily subjective, but here are 10 movies from the past decade that made those few moviegoers who saw them cringe. Disagree? Talk among yourselves.

10. THE SPIRIT

* Release date: December 25, 2008

* Estimated cost: $60 million

* Domestic gross: $19.8 million

Frank Miller, the man who created the comics “300″ and “Sin City,” and who redefined Batman and Daredevil for the modern age, directed this adaptation of Will Eisner’s comic-strip hero. Starring Samuel L. Jackson and a bevy of beauties, it may have looked good on the page. But onscreen, the heavily stylized, nearly black-and-white results were disastrous. The expensive movie was killed by comic fans, who wanted Miller to go back to comics, and critics, who trashed the movie’s over-the-top tones and aesthetics. Consequently, the partners at the company behind the production, Odd Lot Entertainment, parted ways after 23 years together. It even killed plans for a Miller-directed version of “Buck Rogers.”

9. GRINDHOUSE

* Release date: April 6, 2007

* Estimated cost: $67 million

* Domestic gross: $25 million

Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez managed to turn twice the filmmaking firepower into half the box office (and a third of the critical praise). With “Grindhouse,” what began as an explicit exercise in joyous B-movie cinema homage — a double bill of ’70s-style schlock, one film from each director — ended up aping its scuzzy genre ancestors a little too closely in the receipts department. After the three-hour-plus “Grindhouse” opened to a mere $11.6 million, Harvey Weinstein split the film’s two parts — “Death Proof” and “Planet Terror” — and shuttled them to international markets individually. While that recouped a little of the Weinstein Co.’s money, it incurred the wrath of purists who were angry that the original film had been corrupted. Tarantino and Weinstein are famously loyal to each other, and while the writer-director eventually made good on the losses with the $120 million-grossing “Inglourious Basterds” this year, “Grindhouse” was one instance where loyalty nearly brought down the house.

8. ROLLERBALL

* Release date: February 8, 2002

* Estimated cost: $70 million

* Domestic gross: $19 million

Norman Jewison’s 1975 comment on violence, corporatism and spectacle has its place in the paranoid ’70s-era cult film pantheon. John McTiernan’s remake, on the other hand, would be totally forgettable if it weren’t so spectacularly misconceived in every way. The cast — Jean Reno, Chris Klein, LL Cool J and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos — was a C-list mishmash closer to reality TV than big-budget studio moviemaking. McTiernan had long since dented his box-office bona fides with “Last Action Hero” and “The 13th Warrior.” And the studio releasing it — MGM — was so aware of its bomb-worthiness that it pushed the release back four times, out of the summer 2001 field and into the barren wasteland of February. In a last act of desperation, the movie was also re-edited from an R to a PG-13 rating, sabotaging any last chance it had at an audience. Ultimately, it pretty much wrecked McTiernan’s career (he has directed only one film since).

7. THE INVASION

* Release date: August 17, 2007

* Estimated cost: $80 million

* Domestic gross: $15.1 million

Nicole Kidman couldn’t have started the decade any hotter, scoring with “Moulin Rouge,” “The Others” and “The Hours.” But after 2002, her career went cold in the U.S. (”Stepford Wives,” “Bewitched,” “Australia” and “The Golden Compass”); it’s as if the actress was abducted by some sort of soul-draining body snatcher. But wait, isn’t that what she’s fighting in “The Invasion,” Hollywood’s latest remake of the 1956 film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”? This time around, the eerie premise, based on a novel by Jack Finney, failed to catch fire. The Wachowski brothers’ second unit director, James McTeigue, was called in to shoot additional scenes written by the “Matrix” whiz kids after original director Oliver Hirschbiegel was sent packing, having filmed the bulk of the movie. In an omen of things to come, Kidman suffered an on-set fender-bender during the reshoots. When the film arrived in theaters more than a year late, Kidman’s regal bearing took another dent.

6. CATWOMAN

* Release date: July 23, 2004

* Estimated cost: $100 million

* Domestic gross: $40 million

It was inevitable after Michelle Pfeiffer stole scenes as Catwoman in “Batman Returns” that her black-latexed anti-heroine would get a spinoff of her own. But when the inevitable occurred in 2004, this time with Halle Berry playing the character, audiences tried hard to cover up the kitty litter. No one involved with the movie came out unscathed. Not Berry, who just two years earlier had won an Oscar for “Monster’s Ball”; not Sharon Stone, who chewed up the scenery as the movie’s villainess; and not Pitof, the French filmmaker making his American directorial debut. He went back to his native land and hasn’t directed a theatrical feature since. The movie is another example cited by studios in their long-held contention that female superhero movies just don’t work.

5. TOWN & COUNTRY

* Release date: April 27, 2001

* Estimated cost: $90 million

* Domestic gross: $6.7 million

Twenty-five years after he seduced audiences in “Shampoo,” Warren Beatty decided the time was ripe for another sex comedy, albeit one with a somewhat older circle of friends. He somehow persuaded New Line, which usually concentrated on the youth market, to foot the bill. And what a bill it was: With the script still furiously going through rewrites, Peter Chelsom began shooting in June 1998; 10 months and take after take after take later, the film was still shooting. That’s when co-stars like Diane Keaton and Gary Shandling had to leave to fulfill other commitments. A full year later, the whole cast regrouped to finish the shoot, which had escalated to more than twice its original $44 million price tag. The completed film was actually something of a tepid affair. Beatty dithers as a New York architect who cheats on his wife with several women; Shandling’s his best pal trying to come out as gay. And then there’s Charlton Heston, playing against type, as a gun nut.

4. GIGLI

* Release date: August 1, 2003

* Estimated cost: $54 million

* Domestic gross: $6.1 million

If the course of true love rarely runs smoothly, then “Gigli” is an object lesson in how rocky it can get. As the new century dawned, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez — tabloid code name: Bennifer — were the couple of the moment. With an Oscar for writing “Good Will Hunting” and starring roles in “Pearl Harbor” and “The Sum of All Fears,” his movie career was in high gear; she could boast a solid-gold music resume and rom-com appeal in movies like “The Wedding Planner” and “Maid in Manhattan.” Onscreen romantic sparks seemed made to order. So what went wrong? Start with that title, “Gigli,” that no one was sure how to pronounce. Add lots of lovey-dovey media appearances that erased a bit of their mystique. And then there was Martin Brest’s film itself: a low-rent-mobster-boy-meets-enforcer-chick tale complete with a kidnapping, severed thumbs and Al Pacino in high dudgeon. Bennifer split in 2004, just before sharing the bill in another film not too far away on the flop-o-meter, “Jersey Girl.”

3. LAND OF THE LOST

* Release date: June 5, 2009

* Estimated cost: $100 million

* Domestic gross: $65 million

Producer/puppeteers Sid and Marty Kroft were masters of the weird and cheesy; their old Saturday morning TV show, “Land of the Lost,” is remembered fondly by kids who grew up in the ’70s. But the material experienced something of a time warp when director Brad Silbering tried to give it a hipster spin this summer with the help of Will Ferrell, playing a paleontologist who journeys to a parallel universe where he meets the Sleestaks. Normally, any movie with a rampaging Tyrannosaurus (see “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” “Night at the Museum”) can’t miss, but “Lost” was, well, lost in translation. The movie’s PG-13 rating wasn’t a comfort to many families when word got around of its toilet humor. Older moviegoers weren’t interested, and Kroft purists weren’t amused. Over the years, Disney and Sony had both held remake rights, but ultimately this hot potato landed at Universal, where it was one of the factors that resulted in the ouster of the studio’s two top executives in October.

2. BATTLEFIELD EARTH

* Release date: May 12, 2000

* Estimated cost: $75 million

* Domestic gross: $21 million

Blame it on the Thetans if you want, but John Travolta’s space oddity “Battlefield Earth” virtually imploded on the launching pad. Travolta’s career was enjoying a resurgence in the wake of “Pulp Fiction” when he wagered a big chunk of his newfound credibility, as well as some of his own coin, on this passion project. “Battlefield Earth” was based on a 1972 sci-fi novel by Scientology guru L. Ron Hubbard, which Travolta promised would be “like ‘Star Wars,’ only better.” Studios shied away, but Travolta found financing from Franchise Pictures, which would later be sued by investors for overstating the movie’s costs as $100 million. Originally, Travolta hoped to play the young hero who leads a rebellion against the alien race that enslaves Earth, but the film took so long to assemble he ultimately opted instead to don dreadlocks and platform shoes to play the villain, barking lines like “Execute all man-animals at will, and happy hunting!” A planned sequel, which would have covered the second half of the novel, never materialized. “Some movies run off the rails,” observed Roger Ebert. “This one is like the train crash in ‘The Fugitive.’”

1. THE ADVENTURES OF PLUTO NASH

* Release date: August 6, 2002

* Estimated cost: $100 million

* Domestic gross: $4.4 million

Eddie Murphy is some kind of miracle. Five of his recent films lost more than $250 million, and yet he not only still gets hired but also commands his salary quote. But on the flop-o-meter, one Murphy title towers above even “Meet Dave,” “Showtime” and “I Spy”: Trumpets, please, for “The Adventures of Pluto Nash,” whose release was delayed for 14 months. It instantly became the “Cleopatra” of our age. A sci-fi gangster comedy, complete with robot sidekick, set on the moon, “Pluto” was neither fish nor fowl — but mostly foul. But unlike most stars who are tarnished by a mega-flop, Murphy — who did take time off from broad comedies to redeem himself with his Oscar-nominated turn in “Dreamgirls” — just keeps going and going and going

Sony’s entry in the crowded animation field this holiday season is “Planet 51,” a perky though not terribly imaginative feature aimed primarily at youngsters.

Created by a Spanish company, Ilion Animation Studios, this digital cartoon is a jokey reimagining of 1950s science fiction flicks where Earth faced extinction by alien space invaders seemingly on a monthly basis. The twist in this movie is that it has an alien planet terrified of — a human astronaut.

Kids will enjoy the swift action and slapstick gags, and adult minders can chuckle at a few more suggestive jokes, so the Friday release should enjoy a solid opening the week before Thanksgiving. After that, Disney’s “The Princess and the Frog” hits theaters, so “Planet 51’s” box office could suffer a steep drop-off.

The cartoon’s planet is populated with little green people that have antennae, four-fingered hands and webbed feet. Their thinking and culture is pure ’50s, including the music, comic books and movies that exploit a fear of monsters and aliens. They even know to call these creatures from outer space “humanoids.” Then one arrives.

Chuck (voiced by Dwayne Johnson) isn’t particularly bright — his spacecraft is run by autopilot — but he certainly is friendly. Yet the green people see an “ugly” monster in a space suit, so they flee in terror. Only Lem (Justin Long), a model student and aspiring astronomer, can see his friendly side. Soon he, his pal Skiff (Seann William Scott) and his not-quite-girlfriend Neera (Jessica Biel) must hide Chuck from the likes of gruff General Grawl (Gary Oldman) and crackpot Professor Kipple (who else — John Cleese), a scientist who wants to perform a brain extraction on every strange creature he encounters.

There are chases and comical misunderstandings that extend this single-note idea for 90 minutes. When in doubt, the film cuts to Chuck’s robot companion, “Rover,” a doglike machine that collects every rock it finds.

Director Jorge Blanco and writer Joe Stillman not only don’t mind if you associate their derivative images and ideas with other movies, they encourage it. The film references “E.T.” and “Close Encounters,” plays “Singin’ in the Rain” on the soundtrack and makes certain that Rover and several music cues remind you of “Star Wars.”

So “Planet 51″ is Sci-Fi Lite, running through the cliches — no, let’s make that the memories — of old sci-fi classics with gentle jokes and cornball battles. It doesn’t measure up to what’s best in current animation — say, “Coraline,” “Up,” “Fantastic Mr. Fox” or “A Town Called Panic,” to name a few other films the Academy recently announced as eligible for this year’s animation nomination. Those films demonstrate you can make animation that entertains the entire family. “Planet 51″ is not that ambitious.

Disaster swept the world during the weekend as the apocalyptic movie “2012″ registered the biggest opening for a non-franchise movie.

The latest calamity epic from “Independence Day” director Roland Emmerich sold $225 million worth of tickets globally, distributor Columbia Pictures said on Sunday.

Moviegoers in the United States and Canada chipped in $65 million, at the high end of bullish industry forecasts.

The foreign tally of $160 million came from 105 countries, led by France with $17.2 million, Russia with $15.3 million and Emmerich’s native Germany with $12.4 million. It opens in Japan next weekend.

Columbia, a unit of Sony Corp, said “2012″ recorded the highest worldwide opening ever for an original film not based on an established franchise, brand or best-selling novel.

In overall worldwide terms, it ranks at No. 9, behind pictures from such franchises as “Harry Potter,” “Spider-Man” and “Star Wars,” as well as the adaptation of “The Da Vinci Code.” The record of $394 million was set in July by “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.”

“2012,” which cost about $200 million to make, uses the Mayan calendar and other end-of-days prophecies to depict the world’s demise courtesy of a solar meltdown. Critics were predictably skeptical.

Columbia said the film received strong ratings from moviegoers in exit polling. Demographic data revealed that 45 percent of patrons were aged under 25.

The studio had been hoping for a worldwide opening in the $150 million range, said Rory Bruer, Columbia’s president of worldwide distribution.

“CHRISTMAS” CHEER FOR CARREY

Last weekend’s domestic champion, “A Christmas Carol,” slipped to No. 2 with $22.3 million, taking the 10-day haul for Walt Disney Co’s animated Dickens adaptation to $63.3 million. The film lost just 26 percent of its audience from its somewhat underwhelming opening last weekend, indicating that it could have durability as the holiday season approaches. Drops of about 50 percent are the norm.

The Jim Carrey vehicle also earned $16 million internationally, including a top-ranked opening haul of $3.1 million in Japan. The foreign total stands at $34 million, early in the film’s campaign.

The other big story in North America was “Precious,” which jumped eight places to No. 4 with $6.1 million in its second weekend of limited release.

The urban drama about a young incest survivor is playing in just nine cities, but will be in about 100 markets next weekend, when the “Twilight” sequel “New Moon” will likely open at No. 1. The total for “Precious” stands at $8.9 million, said Lionsgate, a unit of Lions Gate Entertainment Corp.

Just ahead of “Precious” was the George Clooney war satire “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” which held steady at No. 3 with $6.2 million — off 51 percent in its second weekend. The 10-day total stands at $23.4 million. It was released by Overture Films, a unit of Liberty Media Corp.

Michael Jackson’s “This is It” fell three places to No. 5 with $5.1 million in its third weekend. Columbia’s concert documentary has earned $67.2 million domestically and $155.4 million internationally.

The only other new release in North America sank on launch. The British ’60s comedy “Pirate Radio,” starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, opened at No. 11 with $2.9 million. The movie, which already failed internationally, was released by Focus Features, a unit of General Electric Co’s NBC Universal.