The Dark Knight easily held onto the No. 1 spot at the box office for the second consecutive week, earning another $75.6 million domestically to bring its 10-day total to a record-setting $314 million. These numbers have some industry insiders speculating about the possibility of Dark Knight overtaking Titanic as the highest-grossing movie of all-time. The Chris Nolan superhero sequel has a long way to go to reach those heights, however.
Second place went to the new Will Ferrell-John C. Reilly comedy Step Brothers, which earned a healthy $30 million in its debut. The former Talladega Nights co-stars have proven to be a successful comedy duo, teaming up this time to play 40-year-olds who end up sharing a bedroom when their parents get married.
Last week’s second-place film, the Meryl Streep vehicle Mama Mia!, slipped a notch to third place after earning $17.9 million. The somewhat surprising hit has now racked up a cumulative gross of $62.7 million — outstripping its estimated $52 million budget and putting the film in the “profitable” category.
The other new release of the weekend was The X-Files: I Want to Believe, which took in just $10.2 million — barely enough to cover Orlando vacations for the cast and crew! The film comes 6 years after the television series went off the air, and its low budget (around $30 million) coupled with a very un-X-Files storyline, yielded a finished product that has been hammered by critics and fans alike.
Here’s the complete Top 10 for the weekend ending 7/27/08:
- The Dark Knight, $75.6 million
- Step Brothers, $30 million
- Mama Mia!, $17.9 million
- The X-Files: I Want to Believe, $10.2 million
- Journey to the Center of the Earth, $9.41 million
- Hancock, $8.2 million
- WALL-E, $6.35 million
- Hellboy II: The Golden Army, $4.93 million
- Space Chimps, $4.38 million
- Wanted, $2.73 million