This weekend Quentin Tarantino’s new movie Inglorious Basterds opened up in the U.S., making $38.1 million over the weekend, giving it the glorious distinction of highest-grossing opening for a movie released in the second half of August. This opening is also the highest of any Tarantino movie, both on an overall and per-theater basis, and far greater than of other movies of a similar genre. Perhaps most importantly for Tarantino this opening is a tremendous improvement over his last movie, Grindhouse, which had a horrific opening of $11.6 million.

By applying appropriate ticket prices for each of the release years, however, it becomes apparent that Saving Private Ryan had a bigger opening weekend, selling about 23% more tickets than Inglorious Basterds.

In any case, given its strong start, and mostly positive reviews (88% on the Tomatometer), Inglorious Basterds can be expected to largely well over the long run. How well you may ask? Excluding Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, on average these movies made 30% of their total U.S. box office during their opening weekend. This correlates with the rough third I found with the top 100 movies of 2008. Therefore, Inglorious Basterds should make around $122 million. Of course, if other hit movies don’t appear to show up Basterds, the movie might turn out to have serious “legs” similar to Tropic Thunder, a 2008 August release whose opening weekend of $25.8 million resulted to be only 23% of its final tally of $110.5 million. Legs this long would allow Inglorious Basterds to gross $165.5 million, which may end up placing it among the top 10 movies of 2009. That would be glorious indeed.