Third Winning Week for Tropic Thunder; $500 Million for The Dark Knight

Posted by John Cairns (jcairns@filmschoolrejects.com) on September 1, 2008

Tropic Thunder hits theaters today

Well, it’s pretty obvious that people out there across North America are just movied-out. Everyone is just sick of movies. They are too busy vacationing/watching college football/fleeing hurricanes to bother with the latest junk at the theaters. (Yes, I consider Disaster Movie to be junk.) So as a result, it was more of the same on top of the charts. Tropic Thunder won the four-day Labor Day weekend with a haul of only $14 million dollars, just nosing out Babylon A.D.

The four-day numbers are as follows:

1. Tropic Thunder	$14.3 million
2. Babylon A.D.	$12 million
3. Traitor	$11.5 million
4. The Dark Knight	$11.0 million
5. The House Bunny	$10.2 million
6. Death Race	$8.2 million
7. Disaster Movie	$6.8 million
8. Mamma Mia!	$5.8 million
9. Pineapple Express	$4.5 million
10. Vicky Christina Barcelona	$3.5 million

This is the third weekend in a row for Tropic Thunder at the top of the box office, holding off competition that turned out to be absolutely weak. Babylon A.D. won on Friday night, but that was it. Another new movie, Traitor, was third at $11.5 million. It was a COMPLETE DISASTER for Disaster Movie, trudging along in seventh spot — a sure sign that people are fed up with all these lame-o spoof movies. And I was WAY OFF about how those box-office duds College and Hamlet 2 would do. Not even a Top Ten finish for those two bombs!!! College hauled in $2,635,000 and Hamlet 2 $2,124,000. That’s pretty dismal.

As for next weekend, it should be another down weekend with only one new flick Bangkok Dangerous rolling out. If it doesn’t finish first against this lineup of (mostly) losers at the box office, I’d be surprised.

Now, last but not least, we end off with yet another milestone for The Dark Knight! On Sunday afternoon the Caped Crusader passed the $500 million mark in domestic box office, only the second movie in history to do that. You want to know why the box office this summer was ahead of last year? It was all because of this flick, which won the summer movie season box-office title by so wide a margin over Iron Man that it was a joke. On the final day of August, The Dark Knight puts an exclamation mark on a summer dominated by superheros — but mostly, dominated by one superhero in particular. The Batman. (Although I have to say, Robert Downey Jr.’s had a pretty good summer for himself, too.)

Now we can say it. Summer movie season is OVER. (Before any of you slit your writs: James Bond is coming back. Soon.)

See you again later this week as we preview Bangkok Dangerous here at the Reject Report, and get ready for several weeks of empty theaters.