Can “The Dark Knight” stay on top of the U.S. Box Office for an unprecedented fifth weekend in a row? If any film hitting theaters this weekend can dethrone the bat, it would be Ben Stiller’s Hollywood Satire, “Tropic Thunder,” according to most tradespeople in the know and those with reasonable box-office acumen (almost any blogger).
Figures for Thursday haven’t come in yet, but ‘Thunder’ opened Wednesday and collected a $6.3 million cume.
Last weekend, a similar battle occurred between the Judd Apatow comedy “Pineapple Express” and the juggernaut that is “The Dark Knight” reigned supreme. But as we noted earlier this week, the only reason that ‘TDK’ won the challenge was because ‘Pineapple’ also came out early on a Wednesday and those numbers subtracted from their overall 3-day weekend total.
Even though ‘Thunder’ has had a few bumps in its release pathway, (see the retards protesting ), ‘TDK’ has had a steady decline of about 40% per weekend at the box office. To complicate the predictions of this weekend showdown take note: ‘Thunder’ only made about half as much money as ‘Pineapple Express’ did on its first two early days of release (it took in $12-something million). But still, five weeks in a row? Stiller, Robert Downey Jr. and Jack Black should have enough heat under their belts to overtake Christopher Nolan’s Batman sequel. Or at least at this point, one would kind of hope.