Rodell Mehlhoff has advice for anyone looking to see the latest cinematic sensation this weekend.

“If you want to get a ticket, I’d come early,” said Mehlhoff, manager of the Stadium Cinema 6 theater where “The Dark Knight” is showing on two screens.

Nolan Fry didn’t need that recommendation. With the theater kicking off the latest Batman movie with a showing — on all six screens — just after midnight Friday morning, Fry and Raphael Cardamone-Rayner were the first in line at about 5:30 p.m. Thursday.

By show-time, the line was snaking out the long hallway in the University Square Mall, out the door, around the corner and all the way to the Noodles restaurant on the opposite side of the mall. Every seat in each of the six theaters was sold.

With that much time for anticipation to build, Fry was ripe for disappointment when the film finally began nearly seven hours after he’d arrived. His review?

“It was perfect,” Fry said. “... Above and beyond what I was expecting. Ledger’s acting was haunting, absolutely haunting.”

Ledger is Heath Ledger, the late actor who plays the Joker, the twisted and utterly amoral bad-guy in the film.

The hundreds of fans waiting for the theater doors to open got a villainous preview of coming attractions when Jake Dickinson, a 17-year-old West High School senior, showed up around 9 p.m.

Dickinson, who said painting and drawing are his passions, loved the purposefully amateurish way Ledger’s make-up was done. So he copied it before heading to the theater, and he wasn’t disappointed in the reaction.

“A lot of ‘I love you,’ ‘I love you, I want to sleep with you,’ and that sort of stuff,” he said. “So that was really cool.”

As was the movie.

“It was freaking amazing,” Dickinson said. “It was actually one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.”

Mankato’s crowd, combined with about 3,034 others across the nation, gave “The Dark Night” a box office record for a midnight debut with $18.5 million in sales — edging the finale of the “Star Wars” series that earned $16.9 million for it’s 2005 opening.

Mehlhoff said the Friday matinee showings didn’t sell out, but the three evening screenings did. In 25 years in the business, she’s seen similar reactions to a new movie — the “Star Wars” sequels, “Harry Potter,” even the first “Batman”.

Regardless, the people streaming out of the theater in the middle of the night seemed to be glad they’d come.