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Circling back to box office discussion, no matter what anyone involved with the production may say now, if you had asked anyone from The Avengers six months ago what they expected of the box office, every single person would have been happy with $400 million domestically. I mean thrilled. I am talking “I just won the lottery *and* Brooklyn Decker pleasured me earlier today” euphoric. There is no doubt in my mind of this. That total would have guaranteed its placement among the top 15 domestic performers of all time. It also would have meant that The Avengers virtually matched The Hunger Games at the box office, a necessary step to claim the title of most dominant box office performer prior to The Dark Knight Rises.

This leads us to a wonderful question. If The Hunger Games team was hoping for $200 million and did $400 million (it’ll get there) and The Avengers team was hoping for $400 million and did $600 million (it’ll get there…probably), exactly what should the producers of The Dark Knight Rises be hoping for? I think we all have strong opinions on this, but the honest answer at this moment is “second place." As long as The Dark Knight Rises surpasses The Hunger Games, which is going to finish just over $400 million, it will not be viewed as a box office disappointment.

I am of the opinion that this will transpire since the opening weekend of the film should place it almost halfway there. Even so, I struggle to envision a scenario wherein The Dark Knight Rises matches The Avengers in terms of total box office. I would like to circle back to a previous summer to provide a comparable analogy. At the start of 2004, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was poised to become the first Potter movie to launch during the summer. Expectations were impossibly high for this project since the addition of summer vacation ticket sales from children should have enhanced the already massive ticket sales of the Potter titles to date. Plus, Prisoner of Azkaban offered better source material than the previous two titles.

Someone forgot to tell the consumers about this. They only had eyes for the sequel to a fractured fairy tale about an ugly ogre who falls in love with a princess who decided to become an even uglier ogre. Several years and multiple atrocious sequels down the road, I think we collectively regret this decision. The Potter franchise is a flag bearer for franchise quality while Shrek is…shameless commerce in action. Even so, Shrek 2 earned an incomprehensible $436.5 million while Prisoner of Azkaban proved to be the worst performer in the eight-movie Harry Potter franchise. The clear cut front runner on paper “only” earned $249.5 million domestically, only 57% of what Shrek managed. This is a prime example of why being the underdog like The Hunger Games and The Avengers is better than being the heavy favorite like The Dark Knight Rises. Unreasonable expectations cripple perception.

Consider this. If I had asked you at the start of the year what would be a reasonable opening weekend for The Dark Knight Rises, you would have vacillated between estimating its box office just north of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2’s $169.2 million or just below that number. Everyone believed that to be the target range for The Dark Knight Rises. Now that The Hunger Games, a largely unknown property 12 months ago, has opened to $152.5 million, our perception as well as our expectation for The Dark Knight Rises has been fundamentally altered. Is that reasonable? I am undecided.

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