Box Office Beat Down: Tropic Thunder Is Number One in Its Second Weekend with $16.1 Million

Weekend Box Office

1) Tropic Thunder $16.1 million

2) The House Bunny $15.1 million

3) Death Race $12.2 million

4) The Dark Knight $10.3 million

5) Star Wars: The Clone Wars $5.6 million

6) Pineapple Express $5.6 million

7) Mirrors $4.8 million

8) The Longshots $4.3 million

9) Mamma Mia! $4.3 million

10) The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor $4 million

The Dark Knight's firm strangle hold on this summer's box office is slowly slipping away. The hugely successful comic book adaptation drifted down into forth place with a pretty strong $10.3 million take, giving it $489 million in just six weeks of release. Its drop has made room for other films to nab that coveted top spot this week. In its second week of release, the Ben Stiller directed action comedy Tropic Thunder moved up to the number one spot with $16.1 million, relying purely on strong word of mouth and its Tom Cruise cameo. That brings its cumulative gross to $65 million. The film should see it to $100 million sometime in September.

Quite a few new films flooded the market on this late August weekend. Anna Faris' Playboy themed The House Bunny sneaked into second place, surprising a lot of naysayers with a $15.1 million take. Death Race, a slight remake on Roger Corman's cult classic of the same name minus the 2000, hit in third place with $12 million. And the Fred Durst directed The Longshots, starring Ice Cube, tumbled into 8th place with a tiny little take of $4.3 million. Fox was the biggest loser this weekend, as their highly touted comedy The Rocker didn't even manage to crack the top ten. This cool take on School of Rock, starring The Office's Rainn Wilson, hit at number 12 with a less than impressive sum of $2.7 million.

In the smaller art house market, Hamlet 2 earned just $435,000 on 105 screens. While the documentary I.O.U.S.A. took in $62,300 on as few as 18 screens. This week, it was The House Bunny that had the highest per screen average with $5,563 for each of its 2,714 screens.

Next week will mark the end of the summer movie going season, and the box office revenue will be down even further than it was this weekend. On the horizon we have Don Cheadle in Traitor, which opens on Wednesday. Then, on Friday, you have the weird mix of Vin Diesel in Babylon A.D., the spoof Disaster Movie, the teen comedy College, and the very weird Asian Western Sukiyaki Western Django directed by cult icon Takashi Miike and starring Quentin Tarantino. Which one will come out on top? If I had to make a guess, I'd say Disaster Movie is going to be our number flick of next week.