Before the summer started it was expected in the UK that there would be a title fight for 2008 between the Batman movie The Dark Knight (or the Joker movie depending on your view) and Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, although these films gave a really good run for their money it was a more gentle film with a fraction of the budget which has drawn the crowds at the box office.
The year has seen sleeper hit Mamma Mia! take the summer crown at the box office, a film based on the stage play of the same name, it is basically a platform the music of ABBA taking the narrative through a love story about marriage and long lost love. There are no guns or big action set pieces in the film, and Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan lend their voices to various hits from the Swedish group during the movie.
Although it could have been predicted that the film would do well with all the ABBA fans in the UK it has been a runaway success and 10 weeks after release the film has not been outside the top 3 film on the UK box office spending most of it's time at number 2, the film has taken at least a £1 million on each of it's first 10 weeks of release.
With Mama Mia! simply clearing up at the box office who has lost out? It was a year of very little blockbuster on the slate, the biggest of which were expecting to be The Dark Knight and the new Indiana Jones movie, these did well but the bigger of these two, The Dark Knight, is going to be well over £10 million behind the ABBA sing-along.
There is every likelihood that Mamma Mia! will end up as the second biggest grossing film in the UK (behind the 10 year old Titanic) but on the world stage it's been a good ride for the movie but not a great one. An average performer in the US where it made $142 million dollars, which helped boost it's world gross to $498,795,370, it may well get to $500 million before it's end of life.
