The Dark Knight closes in on a billion

Simon Brew

The Dark Knight is about to break another box office barrier - but the worldwide all-time top three has proven tougher to crack...

Published on Sep 18, 2008

Even though it came out two months ago, The Dark Knight still sits resident in the US box office top ten, with its current running total being a cool $518m. That puts it a full $200m ahead of second place in the summer blockbuster charts (Iron Man), and means that it’s taken more than Prince Caspian, The Mummy 3, Wanted and The Incredible Hulk put together. Yikes.

But is there a slight fly in the ointment? Admittedly not a big one, but The Dark Knight’s international box office – while still chugging along quite nicely – doesn’t seem to be keeping pace with its US take. The film currently stands on $449m outside of an America (still trailing the take from the fourth Indiana Jones movie), which is still by some distance the record for a Batman film, but it doesn’t look like the final total will now be enough to knock The Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King out of second place. The Dark Knight, which should hit a billion dollars in the next couple of weeks (only the fourth film to do so) still trails the last Lord Of The Rings movie’s $1.119bn take, and while it may have a shot at third place in the all time chart (currently held by Pirates Of The Caribbean 2’s $1.066bn), it may be at last that Batman’s box office performance is winding down.

Of course, by nobody’s measure is a $1bn take a disappointment, and it’s considerably more than Warner Bros was probably expecting after Batman Begins took $371m worldwide. But it seems that there are still a few box office records that Batman is going to leave in tact. Although there’s the small matter of the DVD revenue yet to come…