Just to clarify, Beowulf exceeded it's box office projections after just 3 weekends. What's really significant is how well it performed on on digital 3D screens. The crappy thing is that the movie is ineligible for the Animated Feature Oscar due to the amount of performance capture used in it's creation.
James Cameron's Avatar will be the real barometer for the future of photo-realistic animation. May 2009 kids.
What really got me about Beowulf, other than being a kick-ass movie, was how most of the people in the theater thought the movie was live action, or at least partially. Seriously, after the movie ended all of the soccer moms pouring out of the theater were talking about how Angelina Jolie obviously had a boob-job before filming Beowulf.