Weekend estimates for director Matt Reeves’ The Batman are ballooning to over $120 million, after the three-hour epic opened to $57 million on Friday, including $21.6 million from previews. This makes The Batman’s opening weekend haul the biggest of the year so far, and the second-biggest of the pandemic era, behind Spider-Man: No Way Home’s $260 million opening bow in December.
By comparison, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight made a then-record $158 million in its opening weekend back in 2008. Its direct follow-up, 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, made $160 million in its first weekend. Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice had a higher (but rather front-loaded) $166 million debut in 2016, and director Todd Phillips’ standalone Joker movie almost cracked $100 million in 2019. The Batman is doubling the $58 million with which Nolan's Batman Begins opened in 2005.
The film's estimated $120 million-$130 million opening is the sixth-highest for March, behind Beauty and the Beast ($174.7 million), Batman v. Superman ($166 million), Captain Marvel ($153.4 million), The Hunger Games ($152.5 million) and Alice in Wonderland ($116.1 million).
Budgeted at a reported $200 million, the film stars Robert Pattinson as a comparatively younger Caped Crusader, who’s just in his second year of fighting crime in Gotham City. In the film, touted as a detective noir inspired by everything from the New Hollywood movies of the 1970s to Nirvana, the Batman finds himself embroiled in a cat-and-mouse game with a serial killer known as The Riddler, played by Paul Dano. The film has received mostly positive reviews, and a higher CinemaScore (A-) than the DC Extended Universe entries that preceded it.
After two weekends at the top of the box office, Sony’s long-in-development video game adaptation Uncharted slipped to the number two spot with $12.4 million in its third weekend, which is enough to push its running domestic total to over $100 million.
Channing Tatum and Reid Carolin's directorial debut, the feel-good flick Dog, fell by just 35% and made $1.6 million on its third Friday. The film's running domestic total should cross $40 million by the end of this weekend, a solid result for a movie that cost a modest $15 million.
Having settled into the number three spot on the all-time list, Spider-Man: No Way Home has a realistic chance of becoming only the third film ever to make more than $800 million at the domestic box office. Its twelfth-weekend haul of an estimated $4.7 million puts the film’s running domestic total at $786 million, with only Avengers: Endgame ($858 million) and Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($936 million) ahead of it. Internationally, the superhero team-up film that unites three generations of Spider-Man actors has made over $1.8 billion, which is far and away from the largest haul of the pandemic era.
Coming in at the number four spot, Kenneth Branagh's second Agatha Christie adaptation, Death on the Nile, is expected to make $2.8 million this weekend, taking its domestic total to $40 million. With a production budget of just under $100 million, the film will have to rely on overseas grosses to stay afloat.
Expect The Batman to repeat at the top of the charts next weekend as well, as rival studios steer clear of what is expected to be one of the year’s biggest films. Theoretically, it could keep claiming the top spot at the weekend box office until the first week of April, when Sony debuts its long-delayed anti-hero film Morbius.