Oh that unstoppable juggernaut called “The Dark Knight.” Will the madness never end? Not any time soon. In it’s second week of release, ‘TDK’ nabbed itself another $75.6 million in box-office receipts making it the fastest film to ever reach $300 million in the history of motion picture.
“Step Brothers,” the Will Ferrell comedy with thespian-turned buffoon John C. Reilly earned a healthy $30 million for the #2 slot and the other major studio film opening this weekend, “X-Files: I Want To Believe,” laughably came in at a pathetic fourth position with a meager, $10 million total (the film cost $30 million to make).The ABBA musical “Mama Mia” has proven to be a hit. It came in at No. 3 with $17.8 million making its 10-day total an impressive $62.7 million (surely it’s made its money back and more).
Meanwhile, ‘TDK’ now sits at $314 million making it the second highest grossing film of 2008 in North America behind “Iron Man,” at $315 million, a record that no doubt will be shattered by the time we finish this sentence. Worldwide, the Batman sequel currently stands as the 6th highest grossing film of 2008, behind movies like “Kung Fu Panda” and “Sex & The City,” but surely not for long (‘TDK’ worldwide gross is $355 million; ‘Indy 4’ still sits as the highest grossing worldwide film of the year at $743 million).
Warner Bros. heads predict it will only take 18 days for ‘TDK’ to reach $400 million (the last film to reach that mark was the third ‘Pirates Of the Caribbean’ film and that took 43 days). It remains to be seen whether ‘TDK’ can break the all-time world-wide record set by “Titanic” in 1997, but presumably by the end of year it will have outgrossed “Indiana Jones And The Kingdom of The Crystal Skulls,” no? (the the rest of the world seemed to go a little crazy for Indy 4 a bit more than TDK so far…)