It’s no big news flash that The Dark Knight Rises is one of the most anticipated movies of the year. And you obviously don’t need to be Nostradamus to predict it’s going to generate a ton of cash.
But in the game of box office punditry, where many like to armchair quarterback, how much money could it possibly make opening weekend?
Well, according to projections that ran on HitFix, approximately $200 million opening weekend. The current big daddy, The Avengers, generated $207 million opening weekend, where the previous record holder, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, racked up some $169 million.
As Cinema Blend notes, “conservative estimates” for opening weekend puts The Dark Knight Rises somewhere between $150-170 million.
Right now advance tickets are on sale, and we haven’t seen any reports yet of a pre-release stampede to get them, unlike how screenings of The Hunger Games sold out before opening night. But again, there’s still a good three weeks before Batman is upon us again on July 20, and maybe that stampede will happen before opening night.
Of course, The Dark Knight Rises will inevitably be compared to the box office performance of The Avengers, which was unprecedented, and whatever Batman pulls in certainly won’t be chickenfeed.
As HitFix reports, “The key difference” in how the movie does “will be in regards to 3D ticket sales,” which means The Avengers “had the benefit of higher ticket prices,” where The Dark Knight Rises is in 2D and IMAX.
That’s certainly one factor where The Avengers has a box office edge, but again, even if you look at everything worse case scenario, to make the understatement of the century, you know The Dark Knight Rises is going to make plenty of Bat-cash opening weekend – no matter what.
