Holy opening weekend, Batman!
"The Dark Knight," the long-awaited sequel from Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures, sold $155.3 million in tickets this weekend, according to early estimates from its distributor, setting a record for the biggest three-day take and cementing the primacy of superhero movies at the cineplex.
Batman's haul surpassed the bar set last year by Sony Pictures Entertainment's "Spider-Man 3" by $4.2 million and set the pace for what turned out to be the top-grossing overall box-office weekend in U.S. history, with an estimated $253 million in sales. The previous No. 1 weekend brought in $218 million two years ago, when "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" opened.
" 'The Dark Knight' overshadowed everything, but a rising tide lifts all ships," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracking company Media by Numbers. "This was just a great weekend for the entire industry."
The news of the Batman sequel's success raised cheers in some corners of Hollywood, and eyebrows elsewhere, as a few close observers questioned whether "The Dark Knight" had truly surpassed "Spider-Man 3." Adjusted for ticket price inflation, Batman's latest effort, starring Christian Bale, may have fallen slightly short of last year's wall-crawler in total sales.
The average movie ticket in 2008 costs $7.08, compared with $6.88 last year, according to Media by Numbers. By simple arithmetic, that means "Dark Knight" sold about 21.94 million tickets, compared with 21.96 million for the web slinger.
Final box-office figures for the weekend will not be known until today, when actual results are reported. Frequently the final figures are less than Sunday's estimates, although sometimes they are higher.
U.S. box-office receipts have reached $5.36 billion for the year, down 0.9% from last year at this time. But experts said the strong recent showing, along with upcoming films such as the fourth installment in the "Mummy" series, will help shore up the summer. However, overall attendance is down 3.7% since Jan. 1, to 757 million tickets sold. For all of 2007, attendance fell just under 1% compared with 2006, according to Media by Numbers.
This weekend's No. 2 film, Universal Pictures' ABBA musical "Mamma Mia!" starring Meryl Streep, brought in a strong $27.6 million, followed by Sony Pictures' holdover "Hancock," starring Will Smith, at $14 million. "Space Chimps" was a relative flop. The G-rated release from 20th Century Fox brought in just $7.4 million, coming in at seventh place in its opening weekend.
