New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

If you are keeping score at home, The Dark Knight already holds the following records. It had the best single-day performance, opening weekend performance, ultra-wide per-venue average, widest opening and best non-holiday inflated Monday. Thus far, it has set the record for best Friday performance, had the second best Saturday performance, second best Sunday performance and fourth best performance. Also, it has consistently beaten Space Chimps.

So, what would Tuesday hold? Obviously, The Dark Knight was not going to break the record for best Tuesday performance. Transformers earned $27,851,016 during its Tuesday debut (not including the $8,801,025 from Monday sneaks), a total 13.7% beyond what the latest Batman film managed with Monday's $24,493,313. Even so, Tuesday's total was still exemplary. The Dark Knight set the standard for fastest film to $200 million by earning $20,868,722. This is a decline of 14.8% from Monday, giving the Christopher Nolan masterpiece a running total of $203,773,518. Just to drive home the point of how successful this production already is (if you're slow on the take), The Dark Knight will have surpassed Batman Begins' total domestic revenue of $205,343,774 by the time you read this. It has accomplished in a little more than five days what that title needed about four months to do.

Yesterday, we discussed the other five biggest openings of all-time in trying to determine scale for The Dark Knight. Let's bring those back into the conversation to put Tuesday's performance into perspective. I'm also going to include Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith this time as well. Spider-Man 3, the closest film in scale, is not the best example since kids were still in school for it. Even so, its Monday-to-Tuesday drop still exemplifies how impressive Batman's Tuesday was. Spider-Man 3 fell 21.8% from $10,285,268 million to $8,042,682 million. And by the way, The Dark Knight's Tuesday total beats those two days combined. It's pretty easy to demonstrate this film's superlatives.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest fell 13.3% from $18,140,271 on Monday to $15,731,919 on Tuesday. Shrek the Third, a title that didn't have particularly good legs relative to genre, fell 32.1% from $9,632,139 on Monday to $6,538,084 on Tuesday. That's...weak. Spider-Man, also an early May release, is perhaps the best comparison to The Dark Knight in terms of unprecedented early demand. Keeping that in mind, it's still not a good comparison due to kids still being in school. Keeping this in mind, its drop from $11,034,785 on Monday to $9,961,854 on Tuesday is only 9.7%, the best of the seven films under discussion.

Star Wars Episode III fell from $14,352,807 on Monday to $9,907,711 on Tuesday, a stiff decline of 31.0%. It is important to note that despite the exemplary opening weekend for this title, it wasn't the leggiest blockbuster. The movie earned 42% of its total box office during its first three days of release. This why I had not been inclined to discuss it yesterday, but a couple of you Star Wars fans wanted it so there you go. Finally, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End suffers the most in this comparison due to the fact that its first Monday was also Memorial Day. So, its drop from $25,069,370 then to $7,788,937 on its first Tuesday seems brutal without that factoid. A more accurate comparison would be its Wednesday drop of 17.8% to $6,405,448. Batman still beats that and, even more impressively, its Monday/Tuesday total is better than the sixth biggest opener of all-time's Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday combined...and At World's End's Monday was holiday-inflated.

Continued:       1       2