On the eve of Oscars night 2009 The Dark Knight’s total inter­na­tional earn­ings soared past the one bil­lion mark, one of only four films to ever do so (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Titanic and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King being the oth­ers). The re-release in IMAX loca­tions finally tipped The Dark Knight over the final élite boundary.

The fig­ures break down as:

Domes­tic: $533,090,262 53.3%
For­eign: $467,991,898 46.7%

What a day to be com­par­ing the $1bn mak­ing Dark Knight with films such as Titanic and Return of the King — movies that swept the Acad­emy Awards up in stun­ning fash­ion — each grab­bing 11 Oscars includ­ing Best Pic­ture and Best Direc­tor; mak­ing the Academy’s 2009 Best Pic­ture and Best Direc­tor Dark Knight snubs even more galling. As it is, all our chips lie on the Best Sup­port­ing Actor where we are all cross­ing our fin­gers and hop­ing that Heath Ledger can pick up that much deserved posthu­mous Oscar award for his stun­ning por­trayal as The Joker.

Other cat­e­gories include: Art Direc­tion, Cin­e­matog­ra­phy, Film Edit­ing, Makeup, Sound Edit­ing, Sound Mix­ing, and Visual Effects. The Dark Knight could win a total of 8 awards, which would be a grand enough sweep minus the big two, although this is pre­dicted as very unlikely.

In a state­ment released by the IMAX corporation:

IMAX Cor­po­ra­tion and Warner Bros. Pic­tures today announced that The Dark Knight: The IMAX Expe­ri­ence has crossed the $55 mil­lion mark in world­wide gross box office receipts after its sev­enth week of release. As of Fri­day, the film reached a total of $43.2 mil­lion from 101 IMAX screens domes­ti­cally and $12 mil­lion from 41 IMAX screens internationally.

“The excep­tional box office per­for­mance of The Dark Night in IMAX® the­atres is con­tribut­ing to the film’s very strong legs and fan­tas­tic sum­mer the­atri­cal run,” said Dan Fell­man, Pres­i­dent of Domes­tic Dis­tri­b­u­tion, Warner Bros. Pic­tures. “Many repeat cus­tomers are expe­ri­enc­ing the film in IMAX theatres.”

“Chris Nolan’s inno­v­a­tive vision is tak­ing IMAX’s for­mat to new heights, and his film’s impact on ticket sales is unprece­dented,” said IMAX Co-Chairmen and Co-CEOs Richard L. Gel­fond and Bradley J. Wech­sler. “The abil­ity to cross this mile­stone so quickly shows us that more peo­ple are vis­it­ing IMAX the­atres than ever before, under­scor­ing the real poten­tial and appetite for The IMAX Experience®.”

Here’s the next big record that is beyond everyone’s expec­ta­tions — The Dark Knight has notched up a mas­sive $500m in domes­tic sales in only 45 days, after an $11m week­end tak­ing. It took Titanic, the only film that has sold more than the Dark Knight and the only other film to break the half a bil­lion bar­rier, 91 days to do that.

To add to this, The Dark Knight has now made $921m world­wide (major over­seas releases came out much later than the US), putting in 9th in the all time world­wide best sellers.

Source: Com­ing Soon

Despite being bounced from the weekend’s top spot by Topic Thun­der ($25.8m beat­ing $16.3m), The Dark Knight has amassed a mas­sive $471.5m in five weeks — fly­ing past Star Wars to become the sec­ond high­est domes­tic gross­ing movie of all time. Bat­man dealt a dou­ble blow by keep­ing the ani­mated Clone Wars in third place for the week­end ($14.1m).

Source: Box Office Mojo

For the fourth con­sec­u­tive week The Dark Knight has topped the week­end box office, last week it fended off The Mummy, this week it held back the Pineap­ple Express. With sales of $7.6m, $10.5m and $7.9m, The Dark Knight amassed a week­end total of $26m, beat­ing the Pineap­ple Express’ $22.4m, and over­tak­ing Shrek 2 with a gross of $440m to become the third biggest sell­ing movie of all time. Star Wars sits pretty above it with $460m — it’s only a mat­ter of time!

Source: Box Office Mojo

Here is the next big mile­stone in The Dark Knight’s all encom­pass­ing suc­cess at the Box Office — it is now offi­cially the fastest movie to reach the cov­eted $400m mark, doing so in just 18 days.

Would you like to know what the pre­vi­ous record was? Shrek 2 did this same feat, only a full 25 days later, tak­ing a whop­ping 43 days. The Dark Knight has more than cut that in half, and it’s still tak­ing in $6m in mon­day sales, whilst mov­ing up to 8th on the all time gross chart.

Con­tribut­ing Sources: /Film, Media By Numbers

Thanks Tim.

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