Word: knighting
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Holy gargantuan grosses, Batman! Hollywood has just ridden to the most lucrative moviegoing weekend in film history on the cape of The Dark Knight. Christopher Nolan's gritty Batman sequel raked in $155 million between Friday and Sunday, outselling the previous top weekend grosser, 2007's Spider-Man 3, by more than $4 million and driving the movie business to a record $253 million weekend...
...Dark Knight's unprecedented box-office might is "mind-boggling for us," says Dan Fellman, president of domestic distribution for Warner Bros. Pictures. (TIME and Warner Bros. are both subsidiaries of Time Warner.) The film benefited from a unique mix of factors beyond the usual superhero movie hype, including a buzzed-about performance by the late Heath Ledger as the Joker, perfectly pitched marketing, agile distribution and gas prices that have made a night at the movies an attractive alternative to a summer road trip. It also helps that The Dark Knight, as most critics and audiences attest...
...last summer, months before Ledger's sudden death in January, Warner Bros. sensed that Nolan was filming something that might transcend mere fanboy fodder. With Batman Begins, in 2005, the director successfully rebooted the troubled franchise, but this time around his decision to go darker - and The Dark Knight is as mordant a superhero movie as there has ever been - dovetailed with the popular mood. "We saw the dailies coming in and we knew we had an incredible movie," says Fellman. Though Christian Bale's Batman is The Dark Knight's star, it was Ledger's knife-wielding anarchist around...
While 15 million or so moviegoers are streaming into thousands of multiplex Bat-caves to catch The Dark Knight this weekend, a couple thousand or so are seeing The Exiles at the IFC Center in New York City. (The movie opens over the next few weeks in San Francisco, Santa Fe and Los Angeles.) The gap between Hollywood blockbusters and indie films has never been greater, in exposure, box office revenue and media attention. Yet for intrepid cinephiles, the rewards of Kent Mackenzie's long-lost film are savory, and well worth seeking...
...Seeing it is thus a good deed, for the selfless saints of film preservation and for the part of any moviegoer open to a fresh experience from an old film. So if you're in the vicinity and can't get into The Dark Knight, try Mackenzie's film; it has twice the angst at half the running time. And next week, if it' s a choice between The X Files and The Exiles, take a chance on the little...