Proving that American audiences just wanted a little more chaos in their movies, The Dark Knight is on track to have the highest non-holiday opening weekend in box office history after a historic estimated $67 million dollars on its first day. It’s also taken the record for box office gross on midnight showings. But just how successful is it compared with former Batman movies? We’ll tell you under the jump.
The Dark Knight is now estimated to make somewhere between $155 – $160 million this weekend, shattering the $151 million record held by Spider-Man 3 and massively out-performing expectations. To put it in some perspective, Batman Begins’ opening weekend take was less than a third of that, at $48,745,440. In fact, the opening weekend of The Dark Knight will be make more money than the entire theater run of George Clooney’s Batman And Robin ($107,325,195).
The massive success of the movie’s opening weekend will also almost certainly guarantee that The Dark Knight will become the most successful Batman movie yet – a title currently held by Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, which made $250 million dollars at the American box office. But it won’t take the title of most profitable.
The Dark Knight cost an estimated $180 million dollars to make, and so hasn’t broken even yet – by comparison, Burton’s Batman only cost $35 million, meaning that it made its cost back more than seven times. In order to beat that record, The Dark Knight would need to gross somewhere in the region of $1285 million dollars before leaving theaters… and while it’s undoubtedly going to be a successful movie, could it really double the domestic gross of current box office ruler Titanic?
Batman Battle [Box Office Mojo]
