Scoring: There's no such thing as partying too hard; therefore, you haven't been. High five! Here's your box office numbers, brah:

1. The Dark Knight - $75.63 million
Have we grown tired of The Dark Knight yet? While MomzoGate gave off the faint whiff of shark-jumping, audience interest in Christopher Nolan's epochal tale of good vs. unwashed hair showed no signs of waning. Its total grosses for Warner Bros. now hover somewhere around an astounding $312 million—and that doesn't even include additional revenues derived from cross-promotions like The Dark Whopper, Australian Burger King's broodiest batburger yet! (Apparently they also flip a coin to see if you'll either get a free order of onion rings, or watch your first born son get his head shot off. Those Aussies aren't fucking around with their Dark Knight tie-ins.)

2. Step Brothers - $30 million
The simple comedy arithmetic of double the imbecilic man-children = double the fun seems to have played itself out nicely for Sony's Step Brothers, as this heartwarming A Very Special Brady story took in a robust 30 mil, with four-out-of-five moviegoers rating it as "funnier the first time, when it was called Dumb and Dumber."

3. Mamma Mia! - $17.865 million
In a strange and beautiful accident of nature, a variety of aquatic mammals—small whales, manatees, and the like—have beached themselves outside the doors of theaters screening this ebullient ABBA-musical, drawn to the siren song of Pierce Brosnan's otherworldly vocal stylings. Fear not: They've been relocated to The Grove's dancing waters, where they seem to be perfectly happy surviving off any Cheesecake Factory leftovers tossed to them by visitors.

4. The X-Files: I Want to Believe - $10.2 million
Sadly, not every beloved franchise to return to the big screen after an extended absence was greeted with the enthusiasm of a Sex and the City, as the tepidly reviewed The X-Files: You Had Me Until The Anal-Probe Business failed to attract much more than the most ardent Scullyite fundamentalists.

5. Journey to the Center of the Earth - $9.415 million
At virtually any screening of this 3-D sci-fi spectacular, you'll see a crowd of delighted children in plastic glasses waving their hands out in front of their faces, attempting unsuccessfully to get a feel of Brendan Fraser's amazingly lifelike self-respect. It's like it's actually there!

• WEEKEND BOX OFFICE July 25–27, 2008 [Box Office Mojo]

WHAT'S NEW: The primary competition for The Dark Knight's second weekend will be... itself. You have to feel for Sony and Fox for dropping Step Brothers and X-Files: I Want to Believe opposite History's Greatest Film, but that's just the kind of extraordinary season it's been. Those films will perform decently enough, though — roughly $30 million for the Judd Apatow-produced Ferrell/Reilly comedy, $21 million for the sci-fi franchise adaptation — which is another bummer for Fox, which has only its overachieving The Happening to show for a long, lean summer at the box office.

Also opening this weekend are the concert/protest film CSNY: Deja Vu; the oversexed '60s groupie chronicle Eight Miles High; Nanette Burstein's controversial pseudo-doc American Teen; the small-town gardener doc (seriously) A Man Called Pearl; and Minnie Driver's middling psychological drama Take.

THE BIG LOSER: Not so much a "loser" as a handicapping interest of ours, Christian Bale's reported mum-thumping exploits — however blown out of proportion the actually are — could drop The Dark Knight a few percentage points more than it otherwise would have. But even if plunges by 50% (which it won't), it'll still nab $80 million, so again, save your pity for Fox.

THE UNDERDOG: When news hit in 2006 that director Julian Jarrold (Kinky Boots, Becoming Jane) was taking on an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited, skeptics seemed less anxious about a perversion of the author's elegant, class-crash tragedy than how the film would stand up to the epochal 1981 miniseries adaptation. We don't have time or space to even touch that, but it hardly seems to matter: Jarrold's Brideshead bites deep into the love triangle between middle-class Charles Ryder and the Catholic-burdened Flyte siblings Julia and Sebastian, aided by a cast of young British talent led by Hayley Atwell, Ben Whishaw and the extraordinary Matthew Goode (The Lookout, Match Point). Emma Thompson drops in as well for a stirring matron act, but it's Jarrold's scope and Goode's tone harmonizing so dynamically here that you almost can't imagine this story ever required nine hours to tell.

FOR SHUT-INS: Among this week's new DVD's are the Gen-Y card-counting drama 21; the nifty Famke Janssen pool-shark indie Turn the River; the taut enviro-horror sleeper The Last Winter; and, at last, complete series collection of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's Spaced.

So is this your week to catch up on The Dark Knight? Or do you, as Fox so desperately hopes, want to believe? Can Step Brothers actually have more gags than those in its trailer? Go ahead — call your shots now before the August doldrums come to claim us all.

boomp3.com

At the premiere of his latest film, Step Brothers, Will Ferrell attempted to use his newly acquired telepathic skills to make peoples' head explode. Ferrell recently watched the 1981 David Cronenberg film Scanners and felt inspired to pursue the telepathic arts. Ferrell said, "I started out small. Using my mind to blow up cantaloupes, watermelons. You know, the Gallagher classics. Now, I feel that I'm ready to move onto bigger things."

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

*A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.

Over all, American studios depend on foreign markets for roughly half of total revenue. But Apatow-produced films like the Will Ferrell vehicles Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, did more than 90 percent of their theatrical business domestically. And the Apatow-directed 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up had more than 60 percent of sales at home.

The numbers should give pause to Hollywood. When the summer selling season is over, studios will probably collect far less from international markets than they would have with a larger roster of high-budget fantasies like Spider-Man 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. Last year, those two movies did very well at home, then fared even better around the world.

At least until Apatow deigns to an international slob-comedy diplomacy mission to shoot Superbad 2 on Michael Cera and Jonah Hill's study-abroad journey in Paris, the trick may be to just make the movies worse, hints The Times: What Happened in Vegas and Night at the Museum each outperformed their domestic grosses in international release. This could be as simple as outsourcing scripts or casting Ashton Kutcher, but in any case, we hope he does it soon; word on the street is that OPEC hates the trailer for Step Brothers.

• When a Film's Comedy is Lost in Translation [NYT]