Mental Floss

6 Records the Dark Knight Won't Break

By Sydney Beveridge

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Dark Knight recently became the fastest movie to earn $400 million. Opening weekend, the flick filled seats for 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. screenings and fans on Craigslist were paying two, four and ten times more than face value for tickets.  At just over two and a half hours, the movie even tops other Batman movies in length! Despite all this success, though the Dark Knight cannot win it all. Here are a few records it won't be breaking:

1) Summer revenue abroad

The Mummy is burying Dark Knight in weekly box office sales outside the US. Oddly enough, if the summer Olympics had taken place in New York City instead of Beijing, Gotham City might have reigned worldwide.

2) New Zealand's top spot

There's simply no budging Frodo and friends from holding onto the opening weekend record in the country where the Lord of the Rings series was filmed. The country was so cuckoo for Tolkien that it temporarily renamed the capital city of Wellington as Middle Earth.

3) Top domestic revenue

(At least, not yet.) Titanic still reigns as the top grossing movie of all time in the US, breaking the $600 million mark. While Dark Knight is certainly moving up the chart, in the past ten years, no movie has come close to sinking this ship's record.

4) Video game success

Spider-man 3, Shrek 3 and other top movies released video games at the same time that they hit the theaters.  So far, Dark Knight hasn't issued a video game version, and with it, has lost as much as $100 million in revenue.

5) Most expensive movie

In recent years, Spider-Man 3 clocked in at $258 million in production costs. If you adjust for inflation, 1963's $44 million Cleopatra would have cost nearly $300 million. By that measure, Dark Knight seems like a bargain at an estimated $185 million.

6) Most Prince-ly soundtrack

While Prince recorded one of the two soundtracks for the 1989's Batman, and appeared in music videos, including Batdance and Partyman, he was noticeably absent from the new movie's soundtrack. Sorry, Dark Knight!