The Reject Report Wants to Believe in the Dark Knight (and Will Ferrell)

Posted by John Cairns (jcairns@filmschoolrejects.com) on July 25, 2008

Well, it is Week 2 of The Dark Knight here at the Reject Report! Yes, we still can’t get enough of the Caped Crusader, and neither can audiences. That flick continues to keep on raking in the cash and has set even more records this week. In the meantime, two more new flicks, Step Brothers and The X-Files: I Want to Believe roll out. I want to believe these two will do well, but they won’t. This looks to be more of the same, and people are talking openly about whether The Dark Knight will be able to topple Titanic for the top box office of all time. That seems unlikely: Titanic made $600 million dollars in its run. But it says a lot about The Dark Knight that fans are even bringing the subject up.

Anyway, there are more records to pass along. As we told you, The Dark Knight set the weekend box office record, and we can now confirm that in fact it made $158 million for the whole weekend, $7 million more than what Spider-Man 3 made in its record open. The $43 million haul on Sunday was also a record for that day, again topping Spidey 3. Then on Tuesday, a big record fell: The Dark Knight passed the $200 million mark ($203 mil, to be exact)! The Dark Knight is now the fastest movie to reach $200 million, beating the old mark set by Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, which hit $200 mil on its eighth day of release. As well, The Dark Knight has officially set the seven-day record, with two days to spare!!

As well, the $24 million haul on Monday represents a new Monday non-holiday box office record; it also ranks as the second-best Monday of all time after Spider-Man 2. It is also the number 2 movie of all time for Tuesday, behind Transformers. On Wednesday, The Dark Knight passed the entire gross of its predecessor Batman Begins.

The next question is when will The Dark Knight become the fastest movie ever to make it to $300 million. There is also talk that this flick may even make it all the way to $400 million. The records for fastest $400 million in history are held by the original Spider-Man and Titanic, which both hit $400 million after 66 days.

Needless to say, with all these records still falling all over the place I am predicting another massive weekend for The Dark Knight with a haul of $73 million. Think about this for a moment: I am predicting an over fifty percent drop for this flick, and yet The Dark Knight STILL finishes in first place by a landslide. Most flicks don’t even open to these kinds of numbers, folks. This is blockbuster territory we are talking about here, record-shattering territory. This is the type of thing that box-office fans and prognosticators dream about.

In case you are wondering, there are some new flicks on the way this weekend, with two major wide releases. So now I will proceed to serve up this weekend’s roadkill, uh, I mean movies.

We begin with Step Brothers, a comedy starring two funny guys, Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, who worked together on Talladega Nights. It’s directed by Adam McKay, who directed Anchorman. Which was a darned good movie, might I add. This one is about two guys who’ve never left home who become competitive stepbrothers when their parents get married. These two seem to be in a state of arrested development in the movie: they’re told “you have one month to get jobs or you’re out on your asses!!” Mary Steenburgen and Richard Jenkins also star.

I do not see this becoming any sort of massive hit, but I have heard that the testing is good for the movie. People have some good things to say about it, and frankly people are starved for comedy right now after getting nothing but action all summer long from these superheroes like Batman and Iron Man, and the Incredible Hulk. So I am predicting $28 million dollars and a second-place finish for Step Brothers, which rolls out on nearly 3,100 screens.

Then we have The X-FIles: I Want to Believe, starring that guy from “Californication” and some red-haired cougar named Gillian something-or-other who was on TV years ago.

Just kidding. Actually, I’m kind of not kidding. The problem for this movie is that it is so Nineties, and nobody under the age of 30 cares about X-Files. Which is too bad, because it was a good show. Here, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson reprise their roles as Fox Mulder and Dana Scully for this movie. Much of the plot has been kept under wraps, but this movie kind of stands on its own two feet as a production and it takes the whole Mulder-Scully relationship to new levels, as they continue their search for the truth about all the paranormal stuff going on out there. (I guess the suspense in the last movie was over whether these two would kiss on-screen.)

As I say, this flick is so last-century, and I think it’s roadkill for that reason alone. The audience that would want to go see this movie is all excited about The Dark Knight instead, and this movie has little buzz going for it as far as I can tell. It’s rolling out on almost 3,200 screens, but it’ll play in front of plenty of empty seats as the tracking is not good. My prediction is a $19 million haul.

So those are the two movies being served up as alternatives to The Dark Knight. And I predict another slaughter of a weekend at the box office. My predicted order of finish is as follows:

Well, what do you expect? With Comic-Con coming up and with Christian Bale making news in the worst way (accused of assault this week), the publicity machine just keeps on working for The Dark Knight whether we want it to or not.

We will see you at the end of the weekend when we count the loot here once again at the Reject Report!

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