The Dark (Mid)knight

By Steven Zeitchik

Get ready for the spate of breathless news reports all finding ways to say "really, really, big." Warners just put out its "Dark Knight" numbers for the midnight Thursday screenings, and it's a whopping $18.4 million, the highest ever for than slot and of course more than many successful movies earn all weekend. Dan Fellman: "From our earliest screenings, the buzz on the film has been white hot and it hasn’t let up.

Just to rub it in, the studio notes, "That total does not include the grosses from the subsequent 3:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. showings."

The news -- and, more specifically, the announcement of said news -- means that box-office has officially migrated from a Monday story to a Sunday story to a Saturday story to a Friday afternoon story.

And it means that a weekend filled with "gargantuan, colossal, ginormous" and other thesaurus-enabled words is officially upon us.

Us, we'll just stick to the 'night' puns.

Comments

[Liz]

We managed to overload the Fandango machines at my theater, and everyone had to pick up their tickets at the box office. Out of paper? Just plain confused? We'll never know, but it was pretty awesome anyway.