With the Labor Day week-end marking the end of this year’s summer movie season, the big-screen films that have hit the cinemas since May are now counting their blessings. And their domestic earnings.

Ben Stiller’s “Tropic Thunder,” which stars Jack Black and Robert Downey Jr. in an action comedy about a group of actors who set out to make the biggest-budget war film and end up, after the director refuses to stop shooting, in the jungles of Southeast Asia, was this week-end’s number 1.

That makes three week-ends in a row for the Hollywood satire. Furthermore, it makes “Tropic Thunder” the second 2008 movie to reach such a performance, the first one being, as you might have already guessed, “The Dark Knight.”

Up to now, the movie has earned $86.6 million domestically, with a profit of $14.3 million during this 4-day week-end.

The runner-up in this summer’s competition was “Babylon A.D.”, in which action-star Vin Diesel plays a mercenary who takes on the responsibility of escorting a woman, who is host to an organism designed to produce a genetically modified Messiah, from Russia to America. The sci-fi epic earned, from Friday to Monday, $9.6 million and also a D+ CinemaScore grade from audiences.

“The Dark Knight,” with week-end earnings amounting to $11 million, scored the third position and managed to become the second movie in history to go over the $500 million revenue border when it comes to domestic earnings, since it has brought in $504.7 million in only 45 days.

It surely comes as no surprise that the first movie to have done so was “Titanic.”