Proving that American audiences just wanted a little more chaos in their movies, The Dark Knight is on track to have the highest non-holiday opening weekend in box office history after a historic estimated $67 million dollars on its first day. It's also taken the record for box office gross on midnight showings. But just how successful is it compared with former Batman movies? We'll tell you under the jump.

The Dark Knight is now estimated to make somewhere between $155 - $160 million this weekend, shattering the $151 million record held by Spider-Man 3 and massively out-performing expectations. To put it in some perspective, Batman Begins' opening weekend take was less than a third of that, at $48,745,440. In fact, the opening weekend of The Dark Knight will be make more money than the entire theater run of George Clooney's Batman And Robin ($107,325,195).

The massive success of the movie's opening weekend will also almost certainly guarantee that The Dark Knight will become the most successful Batman movie yet - a title currently held by Tim Burton's 1989 Batman, which made $250 million dollars at the American box office. But it won't take the title of most profitable.

The Dark Knight cost an estimated $180 million dollars to make, and so hasn't broken even yet - by comparison, Burton's Batman only cost $35 million, meaning that it made its cost back more than seven times. In order to beat that record, The Dark Knight would need to gross somewhere in the region of $1285 million dollars before leaving theaters... and while it's undoubtedly going to be a successful movie, could it really double the domestic gross of current box office ruler Titanic?

Batman Battle [Box Office Mojo]

Don't get me wrong; I know that Batman is as much about the gadgets as he is the whole parents-getting-killed-so-he-fights-crime thing. But the last two posters to be released promoting The Dark Knight have both focused much more on the Batcycle than they have the caped crusader; all you can see is his head, on both posters. Holy guano, Batfans; why are Warner Bros hiding the dark knight?

I'm all for mystery, but in the fifteen posters released for The Dark Knight to date, not only is the eponymous hero of the movie absent from eight of them, there are only three where you can really see more than his head or a hand - and in two of those, he has his back to you. When you can actually see more of Christian Bale's Batman in a Got Milk advertisement than the movie's own publicity, you have to wonder what's going on. We've narrowed it down to three possibilities:

Someone finally realized that the movie Batman costume looks ridiculous: Yes, it's practical with all the padding and everything, but look at it - It's like he's wearing a tire. It's a movie where we're already buying a hundred different unbelievable things, so why do we have to care about the believability of his body armor? Whatever happened to the simplicity of the comic book outfit, with the grey and the black and wearing his pants on the outside?

Christian Bale couldn't breathe in and push out his chest for the length of the movie, and almost all publicity shots they had made Batman look fat: Hey, crimefighting's a tough gig, and who can manage to look glamorous all the time when keeping a city safe from Aaron Eckhart 24-7? Just as cops like to stereotypically take a break by having a doughnut or several, so does a Batman like to indulge in his pastry of choice: The bearclaw.

Warner Bros wants to convince fans that Batman is now a Transformer: It sounds ridiculous, I know, but think about it: Transformers was a massive hit last year, and Warners may be hoping that the audience out there is so hungry for new stories about heroes who can turn themselves into vehicles that they'll mistake Batman's head on a bike to mean that Batman has, himself, taken his crusade for justice so far that he was willing to turn himself into a part-man, part-bike cyborg if it meant Gotham City was even 1% safer at night. And when most people haven't seen anything other than Batman's head and his massive bike, who's to say that that's not the case?

It's sad to see that the folks at Warners seem to be downplaying Batman in the advertisements for his own movie. I mean, I like The Joker as much as the next man, but you pay too much attention to him and not your star and you end up with... well, the first Tim Burton Batman. And no-one wants to go through that again.

[The Dark Knight]

Planet Of The Apes (Tim Burton version): Wait, what now? Abraham Lincoln is an ape? This ending sort of follows the original Pierre Boulle novel, but sadly makes no sense whatsoever because nothing in the preceding film sets it up.

Screamers: So the nice girl turns out to be a killer cyborg as well, but she's a good killer cyborg, sort of. And then there's a killer cyborg teddy bear on board Peter Weller's spaceship. Oh noes! The end.

The Thirteenth Floor. Whoah dude. What is reality? How did that guy who died in the 1990s suddenly turn up in 2024? Is anything really real, or is it all just a simulation within a simulation within a simulation?

Titan AE. The captain of the ship is our friend. No, wait, he's an evil traitor. No wait, he's actually changed sides again and now he's sacrificing his life to save our heroes. Plus, the good guy knows all about dolphins despite having been raised among aliens.

Android. Klaus Kinski is working to create androids on a hidden space station.... but then it turns out he's actually an android himself! Whoah!

Every M. Night Shyamalan movie ever. That guy is dead, hey? And the aliens are allergic to water, so they decided to invade a planet that's mostly water. And the village is now. Whoah!

Battlestar Galactica, "Epiphanies." And then it turns out the half-Cylon hybrid fetus blood is magically the cure for the president's cancer. Wha? Why?

The 27th Day. Aliens show up and give five capsules that will destroy the world to five humans. All the humans have to do is avoid opening the capsules of mass destruction for 27 days and the world is saved. But oh noes! The Soviet Premier gets control over one of the boxes and wants to use it to hold the world to ransom and attack the United States. Good thing it turns out at the very last minute that you can modify the capsules to slay "only the enemies of freedom." All WMDs should be that discriminating.

The Mist. The army shows up... just a moment too late!

I am Legend. The cured plague victim's blood is actually a vaccine! (This makes sense in the Heston version, but isn't really explained or fleshed out in the Smith version.) And Alice Braga and her kid can survive a huge explosion, as long as they're locked in an airtight vault. Plus, the village is now! I mean, the village is real!

Mission To Mars. Not only is there life on Mars, but it's incredibly goofy. And it turns out they seeded Earth with life. And now they want to meet Gary Sinise, so they can tell him how much they loved Forrest Gump.

Vanilla Sky. OMG, what is reality? Tom Cruise's tragic girlfriends keep merging into one woman, and he can't keep them straight, but then it turns out he's in suspended animation having a 100-year-shroom dream. But then he wakes up, and he's still shrooming. Or is he? He jumps off a building, and into a big eye. Whoah. What just happened? The end.

Family Tree by Sheri S. Tepper. It turns out they're all animals!

Dark Star Rising by Frederick Pohl. The alien Erks promise to help restore America's lost superpower status... but it turns out every race they've "helped" before has died off!

Soylent Green. Up with people!

Superman Returns. Superman and Lois have a love child!

The Astronaut's Wife. Johnny Depp's astronaut is really possessed by a goopy alien... but electrocuting him just causes the alien to leap into his wife, Charlize Theron.

Highlander 2. No, wait — the Immortals are actually aliens from the planet Zeist! And Sean Connery and Chrisopher Lambert were friends there. They just... forgot about it when they came to Earth. It all makes total sense.

Andromeda, the final season. But wait, Trance the purple girl is actually a sun. No, really! And she gave birth to some kind of ultimate evil thingy.

New X-Men. Xorn, the wise masked mutant, is acutally Magneto, the misguided (also masked) mutant separatist. Oh noes! Except that he isn't. Never mind.

Iron Man/Avengers. Tony Stark/Iron Man has really been working for the time-traveling maniac Kang all along. Since the beginning! But never mind, here's his teenage self, carreid forward in time to take his place.

Amazing Spider-Man. Spider-man's longtime girlfriend Gwen Stacy had a baby — with the Green Goblin!

Captain America. The Nazi Red Skull transfers his mind into a clone of Captain America, and then becomes the U.S. Secretary of Defence. You go to war with the Red Skull you have, not the Red Skull you wish you had. Or something.

Amazing Spider-Man (again.) Spider-Man was his own clone all along! Oh wait — no, he wasn't.

The Clone Republic by Steven Kent. According to the author himself, there's a "stupid plot twist" involving guns that are way way too easy to sabotage. By pinching them. Which does seem a tad weird.

Quantum Leap, the final season. Suddenly Sam is jumping into famous historical figures. He's Lee Harvey Oswald! He's Elvis! But wait, there's also an evil leaper who's breaking everything Sam's fixed! And maybe Sam's a vampire! But maybe not!

Independence Day. The aliens turn out to be vulnerable to a virus on an Apple Mac. Steve Jobs, alien killer!

JLA. Amazo the killer android has all the powers of the Justice League — so he loses all his powers if the League disbands!

And of course:

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. Luke and Leia are really siblings! OMG narrow incest escape!

Thanks to Liz for research help. Also, several plot twists came from here and here.

If nothing else, the press release smacks of desperation. The Weinstein Company's announcement says the fog coated the LA area "in preparation for the opening of the highly anticipated Thanksgiving release The Mist." Then it says: "A publicity stunt? Or a eerily timed Stephen King-style wake up call to moviegoers? You be the judge!" [IESB] More news:

• Nicholas Cage will provide one of the voices for G-Force, Jerry Bruckheimer's live action/CGI project about a group of super-intelligent animal commandos. Cage will be a mole named Speckles. Steve Buscemi will provide the voice of Bucky the hamster, and Tracey Morgan (Saturday Night Live) will be a guinea pig named Blaster. [Moviehole]
• Stop ragging on my Batman movies, Tim Burton pleads. They were cutting edge, but they never got the respect they deserved. And they still don't. "Nobody really acknowledged the fact that ['Batman'] was slightly different at the time from other comic book movies. So lay off, will you?" [MTV Movies Blog]

• The two biggest SF magazines struggle with declining circulation numbers, says SF/comics author Warren Ellis. Ellis' post touched off a blogstorm about how (and whether) Analog and Asimov's can be saved. Apart from Charles Stross and Tim Pratt, few important writers have launched their careers in either magazine, argues John Scalzi. Not surprisingly, most bloggers think the Internet is the future of short fiction publishing. [Lou Anders]
• The fictional drink that stars in the viral marketing campaign for monster movie Cloverfield showed up in the latest Heroes episode. There are also many behind-the-scenes photos of various Heroes actors vamping with cups of Slusho!, which also appeared in an episode of Alias. At what point does "random" become the operative word in "random clues"? [Slashfilm]