Apparently, the London Opening Ceremony (watched by a record-breaking 40 million viewers,) was the principal cause behind Friday’s absurdly low box office figures. The numbers have been adjusted up significantly for The Dark Knight Rises and a few other films from what we saw just yesterday; however, for the most part DKR appears to have been affected the most as is the way with blockbuster features.
That said, The Dark Knight Rises led a weekend that is down double digits from last year with $64.1 million. While that number is noticeably off from its predecessor’s $75.2 million second weekend, this is still very respectable as it qualifies as the sixth biggest week two intro on record.
The Dark Knight Rises’ global total now stands at $465 million with $243.1 million of that coming from domestic markets. As for the sudden surge in overall revenue, that is because the rest of the world is finally getting a taste of the final Christopher Nolan Batman movie and those figures are untainted by the fear instilled in American moviegoers from the Aurora shootings. Expect the foreign numbers to really behave like the Colorado theater massacre never happened.
In regards to the newbies, The Watch and Step Up Revolution did not turn it around at all. Akiva Schaffer’s The Watch really disappointed both critically and at the box office ($13 million) and it might have actually had permanent damage on Ben Stiller’s credibility as he was seen as the front-man for all this. It is hard to imagine Vaughn and Hill will see any real impact on their star power especially because they both have some hotly anticipated upcoming projects in The Internship and the 21 Jump Street sequel respectively.
The rest of the field just dropped the normal amount and if anything they dropped slightly below that level as many people who skipped theater-going last week showed up to see the movies they would have seen last week. For example, we are seeing surprising strength in the family offerings Brave and Ice Age 4 which dropped less than 35% each.