Box Office - 'The Mummy' Opens with $15, 'Dark Knight' in Second Place

It appears that The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor will be the movie to take the box office crown away from The Dark Knight. After two record-breaking weeks, the Batman movie will most likely drop to second place, based on Friday's estimates released by Box Office Mojo. However, it's not like the bottom is just dropping out for The Dark Knight; the movie could still earn $40 million or more this weekend, and its total after 17 days could put it very close to $400 million. Needless to say, the film would be the fastest movie ever to reach that number, and bringing in over $12 million on its third Friday is pretty impressive. As for The Mummy, it enjoyed a fair but not great opening day - $15 million - which should help the threequel close in on $50 million by the end of the weekend. However, a debut in that range would probably mean this is the least successful Mummy movie (not counting the spin-off The Scorpion King), with the original earning over $150 million and The Mummy Returns surpassing $200 million in 2001. There's not much else happening in the top ten: Step Brothers remains a pretty strong option, as it's on pace to keep around half of its audience from last week's debut, meaning it will probably finish in third place and will put it within a couple days of earning back its budget. Mamma Mia! is doing just fine in The Dark Knight's shadow, and will be one of the rare $100 million musicals in another two weeks. There's bad news for Kevin Costner, as his Swing Vote has failed to get off the ground. It will probably battle it out with Eddie Murphy's Meet Dave for worst opening weekend by a major film this summer, although Meet Dave did open in around 800 more theaters. Still, a Friday night take of $1.9 million doesn't extrapolate to a very successful weekend. Getting back to The Dark Knight for a moment, because it is, after all, the story this summer, while it will lose its hold on the top spot, don't think it's all downhill from here. Over the next month, there are two pretty good opportunities for this movie to actually build on its previous weekends, or at least not lose as much from one weekend to the next as you might think. Next weekend looks good, with only Pineapple Express and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 arriving in over 2,000 theaters. Even if Pineapple Express opens at number one, the number of theaters dictate that it probably won't even make $30 million, and if you couple that with a Mummy movie that probably doesn't have much staying power, The Dark Knight could get a lot of repeat business by default. It might even leapfrog The Mummy into second place next weekend. Labor Day weekend will also be reasonably strong for The Dark Knight, because holiday weekends always, always give big movies a little extra kiss, no matter how long they've been in theaters. And by the time September rolls around, this should easily be the second biggest film of all time.