Box-Office Oracle: Predicting ‘The Dark Knight Rises’, Can It Crack $200 Million?
By
Brad Brevet
Here we go, it’s finally time for a Juicy Prediction Weekend™. There are many questions surrounding The Dark Knight Rises, and it’s time for us to break them all down. Let’s do this!
Laremy predicted the #1 movie correctly 5 Weeks In A Row
Can it top The Avengers opening weekend ($207m)? Can it top The Dark Knight‘s opening weekend ($158m)? Can it hit $1.5 billion overall? The answers, in order, are “No, Yes, and I think so.”
The Dark Knight opened at $36k per theater, and I’m calling for $44k here. That’s a significant jump, but we’ve seen it before in massive trilogies (Hi, Lord of the Rings franchise!). The only things working against the film are the lack of 3-D dollars, which I approve of, and the 165-minute running time, though it’s still dominating scheduling because there’s nothing else out there to compete.
I don’t see it getting to $208m – mostly because of that lack of 3-D money. Yes, it will get an IMAX boost, but that won’t be enough to make up for the $2 to $3 less per ticket for the 75 percent of non-IMAX audiences.
At $534m on a $230m production budget, they will certainly make a profit. Which means Sony has to be teeing up a sequel for 2014, right? Of course they are.
I’ve heard the 3-D here was pointless, which is not much of a shocker. Still, it only cost $12m to make, which means documentaries are making a comeback!
Prediction: $2.2 million
How say you? Throw out a number on The Dark Knight Rises, you’ve got a chance to look very clever come Sunday morning!
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