After two weekends, the only question remaining about The Dark Knight’s box-office prowess is whether it will become the all-time domestic champion, toppling Titanic. It’s unlikely, but Christopher Nolan’s second Batman movie is a very good bet to unseat Star Wars from second place, as long as we don’t consider pesky factors such as inflation.
Just how powerful a force is The Dark Knight? Aside from winning this week’s Box Office Power Rankings, it’s breaking a ton of box-office records. But these sorts of milestones are often meaningless because of ticket-price inflation and a record-obsessed movie economy that floods the market with prints. But looking at Box Office Mojo’s comparison of “all-time openers” is instructive.
With surprisingly strong reviews, Hellboy II: The Golden Army topped the most recent Box Office Power Rankings, unseating WALL•E after a two-week reign. Guillermo Del Toro’s sequel fared better with critics than its forebear, and it will be interesting to see how The Dark Knight fits into the Box Office Power Rankings picture with three (and possibly four) top-10 competitors at 72 or above on Rotten Tomatoes and 64 or higher on Metacritic.
It will come as no surprise that WALL•E is the champion in this week’s Box Office Power Rankings. But there was one shock: Pixar’s latest didn’t earn a perfect score, because Wanted actually earned more money per theater.—–
POOP:
Box Office Power Rankings: June 27-29, 2008
A rule to live by: Don’t bet against computer-animated movies for kids. For example: Kung Fu Panda topped this week’s Box Office Power Rankings by a wide margin, finally knocking Iron Man off its perch.
The few weeks that I neglected the Box Office Power Rankings featured two hotly anticipated movies – Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Sex and the City – as well as the second chapter in the Chronicles of Narnia series. Iron Man kicked all their asses, with a little help.
I’m guessing that reading about Speed Racer is a hell of a lot more fun than seeing it, but I’ll never have the movie experience.
So the 2008 summer-movie season begins the way the last ended: with a perfect score. Iron Man became the first movie since The Bourne Ultimatum in August to top all four of the Box Office Power Rankings criteria.
Welcome to summer movie season, now officially begun on the first weekend of May thanks to our friends at Iron Man. That blockbuster wannabe will be followed in short order by Speed Racer, Narnia’s second installment, and Indiana Jones before Memorial Day. Closing out the ever-modest spring movie season, Forgetting Sarah Marshall notched one outright victory and one shared victory in our Box Office Power Rankings, scoring a mild upset by tying Baby Mama in last weekend’s rankings.
Everything new feels old. Al Pacino, at age 67, is the lead in a thriller that was filmed in 2005. It’s called 88 Minutes but runs 108 minutes. That’s old times three, methinks. Forgetting Sarah Marshall is the fifth Judd Apatow-produced movie released in the past 11 months. And Keanu Reeves is on top of this week’s Box Office Power Rankings.
