Los Angeles  - Cinemagoers seeking to escape the economic blues at the movies helped the US box office to a record haul of 9.78 billion dollars, according to the Hollywood Reporter Monday.

The total represented a 2-per-cent gain over the previous record set in 2007.

But the record owed more to rising ticket prices than increased attendance. Cinemas sold a total of 1.36 billion tickets compared to 1.4 billion tickets in 2007, but the average ticket price was up 4.7 per cent from 2007.

The year's biggest success was Batman sequel The Dark Knight, which gross 531 billion dollars to become the second most successful movie ever in the US, behind Titanic.

It was a good year for smaller and independent movies, with films grossing less than 100 million dollars at the box office earning a cumulative total that was 500 million dollars higher than the previous year.

Thanks to The Dark Knight, Warner Brothers was the most successful studio, earning 1.79 billion dollars in 2008 to claim an 18.3-per- cent market share. Paramount was second with 1.6 billion dollars in box-office receipts, thanks to the success of movies like Iron Man and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Sony was 2008's third-place finisher with 1.28 billion dollars in receipts and a 13.1-per-cent market share. Sony's biggest film was Hancock, which earned 228 million dollars.