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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.

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