The mass shooting at a Colorado movie theater late last month dented ticket sales for The Dark Knight Rises, but not by much: The film, which is the culmination of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, took in about US$162 million over the weekend in North America.
That huge No. 1 total fell below prerelease expectations of ticket sales totaling about US$190 million, an indication that some moviegoers were either not in the mood to watch a violent comic book caper or worried about theater safety after the carnage in Aurora, Colorado.
Still, the highly anticipated The Dark Knight Rises managed to score one of the best opening weekends at the box office. Marvel’s The Avengers took in US$207.4 million over its first three days, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, opened with US$169.2 million in ticket sales.
Photo: AFP
Hollywood was publicly silent about box-office results on Sunday; studios, citing respect for the 12 people killed at a midnight viewing of The Dark Knight Rises, declined to report totals. Rentrak, which collects the data from theaters and provides them to studios, and other aggregators, like Hollywood.com, also declined to report figures.
“Putting an emphasis on grosses at this time just doesn’t feel appropriate,” said Phil Contrino, editor of Boxoffice.com.
But the money at stake was too big for moviedom to ignore, and studio officials with access to box-office numbers provided them to The New York Times. Those officials privately spent the weekend marveling at the ability of The Dark Knight Rises to maintain much of its momentum in the wake of the killings.
The movie’s distributor, Warner Bros, did have the benefit of strong advance ticket sales; many shows for Friday night sold out long before the killings, and there were reports of ticket scalpers, a rarity for the movies. The Dark Knight Rises also benefited from a bit of luck — well-behaved patrons and sensible theater managers. After the shootings, studio executives were concerned about potential copycats or sensitive theater managers evacuating auditoriums and prompting media coverage. Security was increased dramatically at many theaters, and there appeared to be no major incidents.
Warner officials had no comment on Sunday. The studio and its production and financing partner, Legendary Entertainment, spent an estimated US$250 million to make The Dark Knight Rises, with marketing costs pushing the total cost of this PG-13 movie over US$400 million.
The film’s sales total, which included exceptionally strong results at Imax theaters, came from 4,404 locations in North America, or about 80 percent of the available theaters. Second place for the weekend went to Ice Age: Continental Drift (20th Century Fox), which took in a solid US$21 million, for a two-week total of about US$90 million, according to multiple studio officials with access to box-office data.
The Amazing Spider-Man (Sony Pictures Entertainment) was third, selling about US$11 million in tickets and lifting its three-week total to about US$229 million. The raunchy comedy Ted (Universal Pictures) chugged away in fourth place, taking in an estimated US$10 million, for a four-week total of US$180 million. Disney-Pixar’s Brave was fifth in its fifth week, selling about US$6 million in tickets, for a new total of US$209 million.
The Dark Knight Rises, which stars Christian Bale in the title role and Anne Hathaway as Catwoman, inspired a sense of awe in many reviewers, who found its nearly three hours a worthy conclusion to this three-film cycle; Hathaway’s saucy performance in particular won rave reviews. (Bale released a statement on Saturday about the killings, reading, in part, “Words cannot express the horror that I feel.”)
Audiences scored The Dark Knight Rises an A in exit polls, an indication that strong word of mouth may help ticket sales in the weeks ahead. But like many movies in this Hollywood age, the film’s ultimate fortunes rest with overseas audiences, and there was no information available on Sunday about how it was performing there. The Colorado shootings, which left more than 50 injured, generated global headlines, and Warner canceled a planned red carpet premiere in Paris for Friday night.
About 47 percent of the US$1 billion in global ticket sales for The Dark Knight in 2008 came from international theaters, but Rises was expected to do much better, partly because of interest in expanding markets like Russia.
Warner has already been working to reimagine Batman for another film series, although a reboot would not come before 2015 at the earliest, given the production cycle these kinds of effects-driven movies require. Nolan has said he would not be involved, and The Los Angeles Times recently reported that he declined a Warner overture to be involved with the studio’s Avengers-style Justice League” project.
Next summer Warner will release Man of Steel, featuring an updated version of Superman and produced by Nolan. But beyond Batman the studio has been unable to figure out lately how to successfully bring its stable of DC Comics superheroes to theaters, even as the rival Marvel — now owned by the Walt Disney Co. — has scored over and over.
That helps to explain why Warner — privately — was exhaling deeply on the Sunday after the tragedy.
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