Sadly our caped cru­sader lost the top spot to The Mummy this Fri­day; tak­ing $12.7m ver­sus Bren­dan Fraser’s $15.3m. How­ever, com­ing back to the fore­font on Sat­ur­day — Bat­man returned to the top with a take of $17.4m against Tomb of the Dragon Emperor’s $14.7m.

The week­end fig­ures added another $43.8m to the TDK total and touch­ing dis­tance of the cov­eted $400m record. The Mummy made $42.4m, a close sec­ond, but a poor open­ing week­end for the movie.

This week­end looked like it would bring in more big num­bers for The Dark Knight, and that it cer­tainly did. After very strong mid-week sales of $18.4m and $16.5m on Wednes­day and Thurs­day respec­tively, the caped cru­sader added another $23.2m on Fri­day, mak­ing the $300m tar­get reach­able by the end of the week.

In its sec­ond week­end The Dark Knight grossed an esti­mated $75.6m in 4366 the­aters, the record for biggest sec­ond week­end ever (set by Shrek 2 — $72.2m), putting Bat­man at a whop­ping $314.2m after only 10 days — smash­ing the pre­vi­ous $300m record set by Dead Man’s Chest by 6 days.

The movie is now up to #23 on the domes­tic block­buster chart. Inter­na­tion­ally The Dark Knight added $65.6m in 7,143 the­aters across 43 loca­tions — reach­ing a for­eign total of $126.3m. In 12 days the world­wide gross has reached $440.5m, despite key Asian and Euro­pean mar­kets get­ting a delayed release in August.

Sources: Vari­ety, Box Office Mojo

The Dark Knight has utterly smashed the record for reach­ing $200m the fastest, the pre­vi­ous record was eight days — by three films — Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Spider-Man 2 and Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith; all big name con­tenders. The Dark Knight has achieved this in five days, knock­ing a whole 3 days off the record. That’s phenomenal.

On Mon­day the movie took $24.5 mil­lion (a best ever non-holiday Mon­day) and Tues­day it added a fur­ther $20.87 mil­lion (sec­ond best ever to Trans­form­ers).

SSH has a nice sum­mary of The Dark Knight’s major accom­plish­ments so far:

Widest release (4,366 the­aters), biggest mid­night open­ing ($18.5M), biggest open­ing week­end ($158.4M), biggest July opener ($158.4M), biggest PG-13 rated open­ing ($158.4M), biggest sin­gle day ($67.2M), biggest open­ing day ($67.2M), biggest Fri­day ($67.2M), biggest Sun­day ($43.6M), biggest IMAX open­ing ($6.3M) and fastest to $200M in five days ($203.8M).

Source: Media by Num­bers, Thanks Keith

Mon­day July 21st was the UK and Euro­pean pre­mière of The Dark Knight, Chris­t­ian Bale, Aaron Eck­hart, Mag­gie Gyl­len­haal, Chris Nolan, Michael Caine and the tum­bler were all at hand to sign auto­graphs, greet fans and attend the shindig.

Below is a 17 video playlist of tele­vi­sion fea­tures, video inter­views and can­did shots of the Bat­mo­bile, cast and crew. YouTube is play­ing silly bug­gers and not let­ting me edit this playlist so the order of the videos may not be too great for the moment. Enjoy.

Images from out­side by Samuel Judge:

Images from inside by Ben30:

Not mean­ing to sour the joy­ful occa­sion and cel­e­bra­tion that is The Dark Knight, but it looks like Chris­t­ian Bale has been caus­ing trou­ble, as reported by the BBC:

Bat­man star Chris­t­ian Bale has been bailed by police after being ques­tioned about alle­ga­tions he assaulted his mother and sister.

The 34-year-old was arrested and held for more than four hours after ear­lier attend­ing a cen­tral Lon­don police sta­tion by appointment.

Mr Bale is alleged to have lashed out at his mother and sis­ter in his suite at London’s Dorch­ester Hotel on Sunday.

He has been released on bail until Sep­tem­ber pend­ing fur­ther inquiries.

Here it comes, the one we have been wait­ing for — The Dark Knight has set the record for best ever sales on an open­ing week­end, reach­ing $155.34m — beat­ing Spider-man 3’s $151.1m.

We were hold­ing a straw poll on poten­tial week­end tak­ings, my Fri­day pre­dic­tion of $157m looks almost spot on , excellent!

“The Dark Knight” took in a record $155.34 mil­lion in its first week­end, said Dan Fell­man, head of dis­tri­b­u­tion for Warner Bros., which released the “Bat­man Begins” sequel.

That topped Hollywood’s pre­vi­ous best of $151.1 mil­lion, set by “Spider-Man 3″ in May 2007.

Source: AP, thanks Keith!

EDIT: Looks like the final fig­ures have been clar­i­fied — the WB had pre­vi­ously esti­mated $155.3m, it instead took in a record $158.4m, after tal­ly­ing Sunday’s fig­ures. It also set the record for an IMAX opener, earn­ing $6.2 mil­lion from 94 IMAX theaters.

We pre­vi­ously reported that The Dark Knight had moved into IMDB’s top movie of all time list — enter­ing at num­ber 4. After another day of screen­ing it moved up to 3, but today it hit the big one — with an aver­age score of 9.5 from reg­u­lar IMDB vot­ers The Dark Knight took the top spot. No doubt this is tem­po­rary and after the ini­tial flut­ter of activ­ity the caped cru­sader shall fall and set­tle some­where fur­ther down, much like Return of the King did — but this is too damn cool not to report!

After 23,000 votes, Bat­man still has an aver­age score of 9.7!

Help us Digg this!

Thanks Josh!

We’d hoped this might hap­pen — after set­ting the mid­night sales record at $18.5m, it looked inevitable that The Dark Knight would go on to beat Spider-man 3’s record of $59.8m. Vari­ety tells us that early reports put The Dark Knight at between $60m and $63m from a record 4366 theaters.

We’re $60m up, just $90m to go to beat that week­end record set by Spidey. Still time to make your pre­dic­tions.

EDIT: Record con­firmed at $66.4m, smash­ing Spider-man’s $59m! Source: AP