X-2: X-Men United proved to be the highest-grossing comic book-based film of the year with a total of some $214 million, good enough for sixth place among all films released in 2003. Ang Lee's film of The Hulk may have proved to be something of a disappointment, but it did earn $132 million at the domestic box office, which was enough to grab the thirteenth spot. Another Marvel-based film, Daredevil, nabbed the twenty-fourth spot with a total of $102 million, while The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which was based on the Wildstorm comic written by Alan Moore, pulled in some $66 million, good enough for the forty-first spot on the 2003 box office list.
While the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the Marvel films managed to move a lot of books in both bookstores and the direct market, so did the film based on Harvey Pekar's American Splendor, although the American Splendor movie earned only $6,010,990 at the box office. American Splendor's total was extremely close to that racked up by Terry Zwigoff's film of Daniel Clowes' Ghost World, which earned $6,217,846 at the box office in 2002 and sold a lot of books as well. Incidentally Terry Zwigoff's latest film, Bad Santa, has earned over $57 million.
Post New Year's Weekend Results
The Return of the King, the final installment of Peter Jackson's adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings saga, dominated the box office for the third straight weekend with an estimated total of $30,750,000. The Return of the King suffered a 39% decline from its second weekend total, but still maintained a strong $8,304 per screen average. The film's total domestic box office take is now $291,987,000, good for third place among movies released in 2003 and within hailing distance of Pirates of the Caribbean ($305,403,440), which it will almost certainly pass en route to its duel with Finding Nemo ($339,714,978) for supremacy.
