Last weekend, the box office exploded with The Dark Knight, which broke the opening weekend record, while Mamma Mia! did what it could in the shadow of bat wings and Space Chimps couldn't reach the top five with its $7.2 million. Matt was almost spot-on with his predictions last week, but I'll try to hold down the fort this week while he's away.

The top five totals:

1. The Dark Knight: $158,411,483 *
2. Mamma Mia!: $27,751,240
3. Hancock: $14,040,178
4. Journey to the Center of the Earth: $12,340,435
5. Hellboy II: The Golden Army: $10,117,815

There's two new wide releases this week -- one for laughs, and one for those who yearn to believe.

Step Brothers
What It's All About: It's the typical new-family scenario with a much older twist. Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly star as spoiled adults who live at home and are less than pleased when their parents meet and get married. Quickly, however, they become best friends who indulge in all the fun things kids do. You know, whispering after lights out, making things... But then their folks have had enough and want to kick them out, spoiling their fun.
Why It Might Do Well: It's Ferrell and Reilly acting like kids, the bunk beds scene is flipping hilarious, and the two actors have a solid following.
Why It Might Not Do Well: The duo's shtick could be getting old, and it still has to face the roaring-forward Dark Knight.
Number of Theaters: 2,800+
Prediction: $23 million

While The Dark Knight dominated the weekend box office here in the US -- with a little love spared for Mamma Mia! and Transsiberian -- in Asia things looked a little different. The Good, the Bad, the Weird , which was just picked up by IFC for the US, opened in its native South Korea to outstanding returns, according to Variety.

The film, a salute to Spaghetti Westerns with a modern twist, is expected to surpass 2.2 million admissions over the weekend, which would make it the fastest to hit that mark this year, beating out police comedy Public Enemy Returns. Its opening day returns put it in the company of previous monster smashes D-War and The Host. We should hear more about The Good, the Bad, the Weird when it plays at Toronto in September.

The news is not as good in Japan, where master filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki's latest animated achievement, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, was expected to dominate. Opening on a record number of screens for a local picture (481), Ponyo is said by its distributor to have earned 83% of the total made by Miyazaki's blockbuster Spirited Away, which sounds good. But as reported by Mark Schilling in Variety, those numbers may be misleading.

As always, we seek to highlight indie films with this weekly post, so let's pause a moment and celebrate the success of a good, old-fashioned railroad movie. Brad Anderson's Transsiberian opened on two screens and earned a very tidy $17,600 at each, according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo. That has to be considered a triumph in the face of "The Bat Effect." Perhaps Transsiberian will get to a few more cities before its eventual landing on DVD shelves.

In a very welcome upturn of events, French thriller Tell No One expanded from 19 to 55 screens in its third week of release and averaged $9,725 per screen. More people will have a chance to catch this word-of-mouth success when it expands again this coming Friday.

Also in its third week out, The Wackness expanded by three theaters and kept a decent $4,441 per-screen average. It finally opened where I live and, while I loved Olivia Thirlby more than I should and was convinced that Jonathan Levine has good instincts as a filmmaker, I'm amazed it's done as well as it has, considering how drab so much of it feels. But that's just my minority opinion. I would still encourage you -- especially you 90s kids -- to consider checking it out when it expands wider this Friday.

Finally, Lou Reed's Berlin earned a per-screen average of $3,825 at the two theaters where it opened. Must be more Lou Reed fans out there than I thought.

Not to be a snake in everyone's boot, but the all-time opening weekend record is not in the bag for The Dark Knight just yet. The $155.3 million weekend estimate is just that -- a studio estimate -- and when the final numbers come out later this afternoon, Spider-Man 3's $151.1 million may still be on top of the heap. So everyone should chill for a few more hours.

Still -- $150 million! In one weekend! For a movie that's dark and scary and complicated and dead serious! That's pretty amazing, though my hopes for this wonderful film's box office staying power were dampened somewhat when I saw it a second time yesterday and heard the banter of the couple next to me, which consisted of statements like "Do you know what's going on? I don't know what's going on," and "I don't even understand who the bad guy is." (?!??) I guess you can't please everyone.

Anyway. $150 million +. First person to call it a disappointment because it's not the world's first $200 million opening weekend gets a kick in the crotch.

The weekend's counterprogramming saw mixed results. Mamma Mia!'s $27.6 million is an undeniable victory, though I think the market was begging for something not action- or family-oriented. I'm not sure what to say about Space Chimps' $7.4 million, seventh-place bow. I don't think anyone could have expected much more from a movie called Space Chimps.

The Dark Knight did a number on the superhero-themed holdovers, kicking Hellboy II down to the tune of 71%, and Hancock a somewhat gentler 57%. Hancock should see $200 million by the end of the week; Hellboy II probably won't get to $70 million domestic, though it should beat its predecessor's $60 million take.

The full top 10 estimates after the jump.

Holy cow, Batman! We knew it would be big, but The Dark Knight blew away all expectations, posting the biggest box office opening ever over the weekend. The film gobbled up more than $155 million, overtaking Spider-Man 3 for the crown, according to The Associated Press. The total is estimated to be $155.34 million, besting the previous high water mark of $151.1 million established by last year's web-spinning superhero yarn.

The Dark Knight also broke Spider-Man 3's IMAX record. The caped crusader already set a record for its opening day haul. One inflationary note was sounded by box office tracker Media By Numbers, which pointed out that ticket prices have risen from last year's average of $6.88 to $7.08 this summer, so Spider-Man 3 may still have actually sold more tickets.

My personal anecdote to add is that when I ventured out to a multiplex to see another movie on Saturday morning, the first showing for The Dark Knight was already sold out by the time the box office opened at 9:30 a.m. When was the last time that happened? Feel free to share box office horror stories below. To talk about the movie itself, be sure to participate in the poll Erik set up last night.

Death is the ultimate dramatic device, but great art doesn't emerge from strong devices alone. In Take, the directorial debut of Charles Oliver, the impact of a single, startling tragic death immediately conveys the sense of watching a gravely serious movie, which is definitely the case. However, having immediately provided a tone, Oliver fails to follow up with a story powerful enough to justify it. That's not to say that the experience Ana (Minnie Driver) goes through after her son dies in a freak accident before the start of the film isn't relentlessly bleak, but there's hardly anything distinctive about the circumstances to make viewers care any more than they would if they were glancing at it in the morning headlines.

Still, Olilver has made a quietly observant work solely driven by the specific needs of two downtrodden protagonists with completely believable motives. In flashback, we learn that Ana struggled with her son's elementary school, which wants to put him in a special needs program. Meanwhile, she has a hard time communicating with her husband and finding decent work to get by. Elsewhere, reckless gambling addict Saul (Jeremy Renner) destroys his life in a whirlwind of debt. His misfortune, as it's shown in early scenes at a prison where Saul awaits execution, will lead him to accidentally murder Ana's innocent child, Jesse (Bobby Coleman).

It's a good time to be a cinematic super hero, and Jules Verne proved that his work still has legs 103 years after his death, but Eddie Murphy's Meet Dave died a thousand deaths pulling in a mere $5.2 million and not even making the top five. Here are the totals:

1. Hellboy II: The Golden Army: $34.5 million
2. Hancock: $32 million
3. Journey to the Center of the Earth: $21 million
4. Wall-E: $18.7 million
5. Wanted: $11.9 million

Three new releases this week, and in the very broadest of terms we have one for the guys, one for the gals and one for the kids.

The Dark Knight
What's It All About: Do I really need to explain this one? Christian Bale returns to the role of Batman in the sequel to the series rebooting Batman Begins, with Christopher Nolan once again in the director's chair. There's a new crime boss in Gotham City and he's called The Joker (Heath Ledger). The two clash, things blow up, awesomeness ensues.
Why It Might Do Well: This will be the movie to beat this Summer. Batman is so ingrained into American pop culture that he's bonded to our collective DNA. Batman Begins grossed $205 million domestically and $371 million worldwide. The Dark Knight is scoring 88% over at Rottentomatoes.com and Cinematical's own James Rocchi had some good things to say about it.
Why It Might Not Do Well: There remains the possibility that people with a fear of bats will join forces with those with a fear of clowns and boycott the film, which of course means more popcorn for the rest of us.
Number of Theaters: 4,300
Prediction: $125 million

Maybe you've seen them, maybe you haven't, but French thrillers are making a comeback in North America. That's good news for people uninterested in art houses solely for the sake of watching foreign films: You don't have to be a Francophile to appreciate smart, meticulously generated suspense, and that's exactly the appeal of several French movies hitting American theaters this year. A steady mixture of warm reviews and positive word-of-mouth appears to have helped Guillame Canet's breathlessly entertaining drama Tell No One land an impressive $240,858 at 18 locations. Earlier this year, veteran auteur Claude Lelouch, long known for his cinematic explorations of eroticism and lawbreaking, remained thematically consistent with a delightfully complex story of double-crossing novelists and dysfunctional families called Roman de Gare. The movie made over $25,000 on two New York screens when it opened in late April, and eventually pulled in more than $1.5 million after expanding to theaters around the country. It's not hard to argue that Tell No One and Roman de Gare put most recent American thrillers to shame. North America, once the haven of film noir, appears to be outsourcing.

As journalist Erica Abeel recently observed in an interview with Canet, "French filmmakers are currently making the best old-style Hollywood thrillers." It's not the first time for a country that has a long history of borrowing from American cinema, and often improving on it. At the beginning of the French New Wave in the early 1960s, former Cahiers du Cinema critics like Jean Luc-Godard discovered Hollywood genre films and decided to make their own loopy versions. The results were often strangely philosophical and experiment works, ranging from Godard's Breathless to François Truffaut's ambitious Shoot the Piano Player.

French thriller Tell No One and American dope comedy The Wackness traded places at the top of the specialty chart in their second week of release, outearning all new indie releases at the US box office this weekend. According to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo, Tell No One made $13,388 per screen as it expanded from eight to 18 theaters, while The Wackness took in $7,258 per screen in its slightly wider expansion from six to 31 theaters.

Tell No One expanded into Chicago, Northern California (Berkeley, Palo Alto, San Francisco, San Jose), Philadelphia, and Seattle. Music Box Films brings it next to Baltimore/Washington DC area, Denver, Detroit, San Diego, St. Louis, and a flock of theaters in greater New York this Friday. It has further expansions laid out for the following three weeks.

The Wackness moved beyond New York and Los Angeles into San Francisco, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Boston, San Diego, Chicago, and Seattle. Sony Pictures Classics will expand the run into four more markets this coming Friday, and then open much wider into 34 more markets on July 25.

Debuting releases August ($6,500 at one theater), Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired ($5,500 at one theater), and Harold ($3,433 per screen at three theaters) rounded out the Top 5. How did everybody else do?

I guess Eddie Murphy knew something we didn't. I don't know how much the star showing up for the premiere of his own movie would have helped matters, but it couldn't have hurt. The poorly (though not abysmally) reviewed Meet Dave somehow turned out to be Murphy's worst debut weekend grosser since 2002's legendarily bad The Adventures of Pluto Nash, and before that 1998's Holy Man. Actually, Meet Dave's $5.3 million take just barely edged out Holy Man's opening. And that's pretty impressive. I probably shouldn't be too surprised, since even I didn't bother watching the thing, and I see just about everything. Bigger and better-looking films have at the moment cornered every demographic that Dave could have aimed for.

Better news for Hellboy II: The Golden Army, whose $35.9 million bow won't set any records this summer, but is a solid improvement on Hellboy's $23 million opening (it would go on to gross $60 million) and good enough for first. On the other hand, Journey to the Center of the Earth's $20.6 million, 3rd place finish has to be considered a mixed success. $11.7 million of that came from the film's 857 3-D locations (significantly less than a third of its total sites). That's not surprising, considering how much the movie was marketed as a 3-D affair; I wonder how many people went in thinking they were going to watch it in 3-D and went home disappointed. (Not receiving a pair of 3-D glasses would have tipped them off, I suppose.)

Nothing remarkable going on among the holdovers this week. Hancock dropped 47% in its second weekend and is sitting pretty with a $165 million cume (though recall that it was released two Tuesdays ago). Wall-E lost another 42% and, at $162.7 million after three weeks, it's tracking behind The Incredibles and Finding Nemo, but ahead of every other Pixar offering.

The full top 10 after the jump!