Daily Box Office Analysis
By David Mumpower
July 24, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com

Christian Bale visits Aurora.
In the wake of the Aurora, Colorado tragedy, box office results continue to be a touchy subject for many movie goers. While being respectful of this understandable sensitivity, I presume that if you are reading this column, you have at least some interest in the news of the day, which is the first weekday of The Dark Knight Rises. As this topic still strikes too close to me, I completely understand. After all, three regular contributors to BOP over the years claim the greater Denver area as their home.

Nothing about the topic is comfortable right now and while this will be the only time I directly address the matter during the Daily Box Office Analysis, I want to be clear that I spent the body of Friday morning panicked over the safety of my friends. BOP’s coverage of The Dark Knight in 2008 was one of my favorite times during the site’s 11 year history. Discussion of The Dark Knight Rises, on the other hand, is permanently scarred by this and as such will always be an awkward conversation for me. I will not bother faking this. So, if my tone comes across as a bit icy at times when I perform box office analysis for Christopher Nolan’s final Batman movie, I sincerely hope that you understand the rationale behind the cool façade.

Let me start by discussing a different personal failing of mine. I despise being wrong. Bear with me a moment on this. My wife had taken a vacation day last Friday in order that we could watch The Dark Knight Rises at first opportunity. Our scheduled exhibition was at 11:40 a.m. By 5 a.m., we had been informed of the details of the shooting. My wife handled the news by obsessively watching all the various updates about the situation. I handled it by literally putting a pillow over my head and going back to sleep. The idea of this criminal assault was simply too much for to assimilate in my state of semi-consciousness.

By 10 a.m., BOP had already posted our box office report about the midnight viewings revenue. At the time, the estimate was $27 million. In the past, a failing of mine has been consistently timely updates, something I am striving to correct. At no point during this update did the idea dawn on me that such a column would seem callous to others. My wife and I were so focused on posting an update prior to leaving for our screening that we did not consider the human element enough.

From 10:15 a.m. to 4 p.m. (arriving 90 minutes early and having dinner afterward), we sat in a movie theater while the rest of North America chronicled one of the worst entertainment industry-related stories of all time. Only when we returned home did we appreciate how tacky that update must have seemed for many of you. Over the rest of the weekend, we demonstrated better decorum but that in no way excuses our insensitivity from that early Friday post. As I say, I hate being wrong and we were in that instance. The fault was entirely mine. While we received no direct complaints in this regard, I still want to offer an apology to anyone who felt this way regarding the topic.

On Friday afternoon, I doubled down on stupid when I returned home from the movie theater and performed the usual batch of box office-related interviews. One of them was a publication with whom I had never spoken before, Time. In that article, I blithely stated that the box office of The Dark Knight Rises was not automatically damaged by the events in Aurora. From my perspective, I had attended a movie theater that was 80% full on Friday morning and there was a humongous crowd awaiting the next showing. Everything at the theater looked normal to me. Clearly, Friday was not my finest hour.

In hindsight, I should have placed stronger consideration into the thought process that I was at an IMAX showing. Those tickets are too expensive for most people to be dissuaded from movie theaters. Over the weekend, there was a rare amount of radio silence regarding box office numbers, definitely a first in my professional experience in the 2000s. When reports started to leak in, it was readily apparent that the shooting in Colorado deterred a significant portion of movie goers from watching not just The Dark Knight Rises but all major releases.

The data is irrefutable. As Tim Briody indicated in his excellent Weekend Wrap-Up, the smallest declines in the top ten were Brave at 46% and To Rome with Love with 42%. For the weekend of July 13th, eight out of nine returning films in the top ten fell 47% or less. After a respectable hold of 44% in its second weekend, The Amazing Spider-Man fell off the table at 69%. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs depreciated 34% to $27.6 million in its second weekend of release in 2009. Ice Age: Continental Drift, which opened $5 million more than its immediate predecessor, fell 56% in its second weekend to $20.4 million. The debate is not whether movie box office was damaged by the Aurora tragedy but rather how much it was damaged. And since I have already stated that this topic is a trifle relative to the incident itself, I will not participate in that conversation, at least not this week.

Now that the mea culpa is out of the way, let’s talk shop. The Dark Knight Rises earned $19,389,129, bringing its four-day total to $180,276,424. There are several aspects of this performance that are noteworthy. The first is that its Sunday-to-Monday decline is 52%. For comparison (and there has to be this comparison), The Dark Knight earned $182,904,796 in its first four days; Its Sunday to Monday decline was only 44%; and it earned over $20 million each of its first five days. Clearly, The Dark Knight Rises is struggling relative to its more storied predecessor.

Again, the speculation regarding the why of this is not a game I will play. What I will say is that The Dark Knight Rises is in danger of falling well behind the pace of The Dark Knight. The movie featuring The Joker had earned $313.8 million after ten days. In order for the final Christian Bale as Batman movie to reach that total, it would have to achieve a magnificent second weekend.

Thus far, the latest Dark Knight outing appears likely to lag behind its predecessor on weekdays. In fact, The Dark Knight earned more on three of its first four days than The Dark Knight Rises. The differences are small at $2.7 million, $3.4 million and $5.1 million for a grand total of $11.2 million over the past three days. Had someone indicated to you three months ago that The Dark Knight would outpace its sequel, though, I am confident that you would have expressed surprise. Yes, there are (sickening) extenuating circumstances. Unless (or until?) The Dark Knight Rises regains momentum, however, it appears destined to fall short of The Dark Knight. This is obviously the story we will be tracking over the next two weeks of Daily Numbers Analysis.