Dark Knight flies high
2008-08-11 10:01
Los Angeles - Batman continues flying high at the box office.
The Dark Knight took in $26m to finish as the No 1 movie for the fourth straight weekend, beating the comedy Pineapple Express, which opened in second place with $22.4m, according to studio estimates on Sunday.
The weekend haul lifted the Warner Bros Batman sequel to No 3 on the all-time domestic box-office charts with $441.5m, behind only Titanic ($600.8m) and the original Star Wars ($461m).
The last movie to remain No 1 for four consecutive weekends was The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in late 2003 and 2004, according to box-office tracker Media By Numbers. That movie did it during a much slower time of year, with nowhere near the competition The Dark Knight has faced during Hollywood's busy summer season.
"It's almost unheard of. Summer doesn't usually afford films that much of a wide-open playing field," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Media By Numbers.
Good enough
The Dark Knight should surpass Star Wars to become No 2 on the revenue chart by this coming weekend.
However, the numbers reflect today's higher admission prices, and The Dark Knight will not approach Star Wars or Titanic in terms of actual number of tickets sold. Taking inflation into account, The Dark Knight would need to pull in about $900m to match the number of tickets sold for Titanic and about $1.2bn to equal Star Wars.
Even so, The Dark Knight has far outdone even its studio's expectations. Dan Fellman, head of distribution for Warner Bros, said he would have been happy if the movie simply exceeded the $205m domestic total of its predecessor, "Batman Begins."
It should top out at $510m to $520m, Fellman said.
"It has taken on a life of its own, and in doing so got so much positive press and word of mouth that older audiences who normally don't rush out to see movies or maybe only see two, three movies a year are coming out in large numbers," Fellman said. "It's a question of `We've been reading about this for three, four weeks now. Let's go see what it's all about."'
- SAPA