Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight continued to rack up the records as it earned a gargantuan total of $155.4 million over the three-day weekend easily shattering Spider-Man 3’s previous weekend record of $151.1 million. The new Batman film, which set a new standard for midnight shows on Friday (see “Dark Knight Shatters Midnight Record”), then rolled up a record single day total of $57.4 million on Friday.
The Dark Knight also brought in a record $6.2 million from IMAX theaters over the weekend, smashing Spider-Man 3’s record of $4.7 million.
Led by the new Batman film, which averaged a stupendous $35,579 per venue, the weekend domestic box office total of $253 million completely obliterated the old 3-day record of $218 million from the first weekend of July in 2006 when Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men’s Chest opened. Compared with the same weekend last year, the total box office was up a whopping 64%.
After only three days the Batman sequel is now more than three-quarters of the way towards surpassing the total of Nolan’s first Batman film, Batman Begins, which opened with just $47 million and earned a domestic total of $205 million. With a plethora of great reviews (94% positive on Rotten Tomatoes), a stellar CinemaScore of “A” from those who have seen the film, and relatively little in the way of major competition in the coming weeks, it now appears that The Dark Knight, even if it suffers a major second week decline, will easily zip past Indiana Jones and Iron Man to claim the 2008 box office title.
The first weekend audience for the new Caped Crusader film was demographically diverse--52% male (a better than average showing for a superhero film, since the genre tends to tip more drastically toward the masculine) and evenly split between those under and over 25.
In completely blasting the conventional notion that a film opening so late in the summer season (it was the last of the blockbuster films to debut this summer) couldn’t contend for the box office crown because of “viewer fatigue” with big budget action films, it appears that The Dark Knight has established itself a “must-see” phenomenon, whose performance can’t be slowed by its length (two-and-one-half hours) or its placement on the summer schedule. While Warner Bros. and DC Comics have been only marginally successful in reviving the cinema career of the Man of Steel, they have succeeded not only in resurrecting Batman’s big screen career--they have vaulted the Caped Crusader to the forefront of cinema superheroes ahead even of Marvel’s Spider-Man, the 21st Century’s gold standard of superhero cinema.
The Dark Knight wasn’t the only record setter over the past weekend--Mamma Mia!, whose audience was 75% female and 64% over 30, set a new opening weekend record for musicals with an estimated total of $27.6 million.
While Mamma Mia! represented successful counter-programming, The Dark Knight’s effect on action films was hardly beneficial. Will Smith’s Hancock fared the best of all the superhero-themed competitors, dropping just 56% and earning an estimated $14 million and finishing third, while Hellboy II: The Golden Army, which took the box office crown last weekend, dropped 71% and fell to fifth place. The fourth Indiana Jones film declined 57% and fell out of the top ten in its ninth weekend of release, while Marvel’s The Incredible Hulk lost two-thirds of its theaters and plummeted 73% ending up in the 15th spot. Iron Man fell 54% and finished 16th--its total of 314,360,000 still leads Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’s $312,584,000, though The Dark Knight’s stellar debut appears to render the Iron Man/Indy battle irrelevant.
On the animation front, Pixar’s Wall-E in its fourth week managed to earn an estimated $9.8 million and eclipse Starz Media’s Space Chimps, which opened with an estimated $7.3 million.
