Batman: $300m man

Batman: Smashing the box office to little pieces

Yeah, yeah, we know. More Batman stories.

But as long as The Dark Knight keeps smashing records – or its star gets accused of stuff by his family – we'll be reporting on it.

Happily, it's the record smashing that features today. As anyone who works near Warner Brothers will no doubt be aware – the whooping and sound of champagne corks popping is a dead giveaway – The Dark Knight continues to rule at the Box Office.

Reports from the US put total ticket sales at $314.2m. It also broke the $300m barrier in just 10 days – the best performance ever by a motion picture.

It's expected to break the $400m (domestic) barrier within 19 days. The previous record holder? Shrek 2. The timescale for that film's $400m take? A comparitively slow 43 days.

'That kind of tells the story,' said Warner's distribution president Dan Fellman to the Hollywood Reporter.

And in other movie news, it appears Ridley Scott's next film Nottingham – about Robin Hood rather than Brian Clough, sadly – has his a snag.

Shooting was due to start next month on the revisionist tale, which apparently sees Ridley regular Russell Crowe play a sympathetic Sheriff of Nottingham, but that's been put on hold due to script concerns, location logistics and the current climate of threatened acting strikes.

The studio behind the film also added in a statement that shooting would probably start early 2009 as 'the film's forest locations need to be green.'

Something tells us the proposed release date of November 2009 may also have to be reviewed.

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