No surprise here: The Dark Knight raked in over $155 million this weekend and broke a bunch of box office records. The latest Batman movie also became my latest obsession (see also: Jason Castro), inspiring me to see it twice in under 48 hours.

For those of you who saw it, click through for my favorite moments from the film and then feel free to add your own.

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ZOMG Batman: The Dark Knight is going to be the biggest movie in the history of movies that are big!! It’ll play on 4,366 screens its opening weekend, the most any movie has ever registered. “By all accounts this should be Hollywood’s best-ever 3-day overall North American weekend at the box office: the number to beat is last year’s $151+ million,” says Nikki Finke. Rejoice, Tinseltown: America does care about your well-being. And it only took the sacrifice of one of your children to get you there.

When Heath Ledger died, Warner Bros. marketing executives behind the new Batman movie Dark Knight, where Ledger stars as The Joker, immediately grew worried that the beloved actor’s death would overshadow their summer blockbuster, and potentially get in the way of them turning a heavy investment into a worldwide hit amid cries of “tasteless!,” especially given his dark role in the film.

And then, between Hollywood’s outpouring of support and some brilliant PR, the mood changed: Dark Night would instead be a tribute to Ledger. The situation went from bad to good to amazing last week, when critics got their first look at the movie and began called for a posthumous Oscar for Ledger.

So how do you take a roller coaster ride from a Doomsday scenario to a sure-thing back down to the horror story level? By news reports of a 17-year-old fella, visiting Six Flags with his church group, getting decapitated while hunting for the hat he lost on the tracks of the Batman ride, where he got stuck and was decapitated.

In a new interview in Elle’s July issue, Mary-Kate Olsen refuses to be interviewed about Heath Ledger. “I’m not going to comment on that. I won’t give you a word about that in the nicest way possible. Let’s move on.” [People]

Was Heath Ledger set up by paparazzi agency Splash News when he was caught snorting coke after the 2006 SAG Awards? A just-filed lawsuit by a former People magazine reporter, identified only as “Jane Doe,” claims her boyfriend at the time and his colleague — Darren Banks and Eric Munn, both Splash photogs — surreptitiously convinced her to to allow them into her Chateau Marmont hotel room. It was there that Banks and Munn allegedly set up a video camera to record the room from the balcony, and then laid out some coke on the coffee table, where all parties involved (except the plaintiff, supposedly) took part in the festivities. Eventually, Ledger found the camera, went ballistic, and was assured the tape would be destroyed.

As we all know, it wasn’t; Entertainment Tonight bought it for $200,000 and promoted the hell out of it, but never aired the footage after half of Hollywood and their publicists threatened to boycott the show.

So why is the former People lass suing now? She claims the tape makes it appear as if she snorted coke, which means she’s after damages for fraud, intrusion, infliction of emotional distress, and privacy violations.

With the new Batman movie Dark Knight premiering July 25, the press onslaught from Warner Bros. will soon be in high gear. But until then, here’s a creepy new still from the flick of Heath Ledger, part of a set of “amazing snaps show The Joker dressed as a deadly doctor and a creepy cop.” Yeeeah, it’s kinda difficult to dress this up as anything more pleasant. [Sun]

Britain’s The Daily Mail, which is paying cash to Lisa Marie Presley for calling her fat, now suddenly has a conscious and won’t name the woman suspected of birthing Heath Ledger’s love child. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t hounding her with questions!

The woman, who was married at the time she had her Ledger dalliance, has since remarried, and her new husband is denying the allegations – as if he would know! – and is even willing to subject everyone to a DNA test to clear this whole matter up. But mom isn’t on board with being pestered with questions and cheek swabs: “I think it’s very, very rude that I’m being posed all of this. I really do. I can’t talk about anything.”

Denial? That’s basically a confirmation! And as the Mail points out, Heath has always had a thing for older women (he dated 11-years-older Naomi Watts and 10-years-older Helena Christensen), so of course his baby juice got up inside her.

Australia’s Daily Telegraph adds a question mark to its headline “Did Heath Ledger father a secret love child?” Unnecessary move: You can’t libel the dead! In their claim, the paper reports a 17-year-old Ledger had a relationship with an older woman (who had a boyfriend at the time), which ended, and then the woman learned she was pregnant. The kid, who would be about 12 right now, could stand to inherit a vast portion of Ledger’s estate if it could prove the biological tie. And it looks like Heath’s uncle Hadyn is pulling for the love child: “There is a very real possibility that Heath was the father.” There’s also a very real possibility this entire story is a work of fiction!

Heath Ledger’s uncles are trying to wrestle away control of the late actor’s estate from his father Kim, who supposedly so mismanaged his own grandfather’s wishes that he had to be removed as executor. Kim assured family members that Heath’s daughter Matilda “will be taken care of,” but that wasn’t enough for the uncles, who insist their wish is not one of financial gain but to, uh, make sure Matilda will be taken care of.

From the book of terrible ideas comes Lisa Taddeo’s account of Heath Ledger’s last days. Published in the April issue of Esquire, on stands next week, “The Last Days of Heath Ledger” is a first-person diary of lunching with Jack Nicholson and partying at the Beatrice Inn in the final days before the actor’s death.

Except it’s not true.

The Times Tim Arango reports editor David Granger – who “didn’t understand what the fuss was all about” when Ledger died – always intended the piece to be a work of fiction, not an assignment to report the facts that turned up empty. (Taddeo, an associate editor at Golf Magazine, does include some facts, like Ledger’s enjoyment of “banana nut muffins from Miro Café.”)

Though a quick look through Esquire’s history reveals this stunt fits in with the magazine “record of journalistic tomfoolery,” we can’t imagine the Hollywood elite are going to care too much for it. And we all know what happens when the press tries to exploit celebrity death.

One doctor in Texas and another in California are under federal investigation for prescribing the painkillers Oxycontin and Vicodin to Heath Ledger, who died from what’s likely an accidental overdosing by mixing medications. Authorities want to know whether the drugs were indeed legally prescribed. And in this era of docs prescribing Ambien because a patient couldn’t get to sleep last night after a 2-day coke binge, questioning the doctors’ legality in prescribing the drugs is like asking, “Was Heath capable of feeling the pain of a pin prick?”

STILL :( Michelle Williams is still bummed about the death of her ex-lover/father of her child. Whatever, that was like two news cycles ago. We kid. The death of Heath Ledger continues to be very sad. [People]

• Madonna is still pretending to be British. How come when people fake an English accent, they become posh-English instead of cockney-English? Class discrimination knows no borders.

• Oh, by the by, Brad Renfro died of a heroin overdose. But did you hear that Heath Ledger died? A real tragedy, huh?

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With Manhattan’s rental vacancy rate hovering around 1 percent, digs are in hot demand. Which is why Heath Ledger’s abode of demise on Broome Street is already back on the market. “You don’t wait around in a hot rental market like this,” one disgusting broker had the balls to say. The 4,400 square feet, with 3 beds, 2.5 baths, balcony, wood-burning fireplace, and 15-foot ceilings, is also getting a rate hike: While Ledger’s stay was billed at $22k/month, the new tenant will be shelling out three grand more. [NYP]

Officially, Heath Ledger died of an accidental overdose of prescription pills. The toxicology report found acute intoxication from of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam, and doxylamine.

The closest thing to a punch line we can imagine is that almost all of those substances come up as incorrectly spelled. Also, good timing on that anti-prescription drug commercial during the Super Bowl.

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