What are you upset about? WB's reaction or that you can't get better estimates? Can you point to me the rules and procedures in how a studio is supposed to act in this situation?

I don't think it would have been so terrible if all the studios and Nikki took a holiday this weekend. The world will survive if we find out TDKR made $130m or $170m on Monday. If TASM fell 60% or 65%.

WB and the other studios are faced with a less than expected weekend gross, and they will get some grief for whatever they do. If they had taken the extreme of suspending films for a day or the weekend or not done anything different and continued with business as usual, they would have received criticism. They made a small gesture which may have been self-serving, and it may not be seen by others as repectful or necessary. They made a choice that may not have been really altruistic, shocking.

suspending the film would have been a huge disaster...

I think I'm in agreement with Xiayun in thinking WB should donate a percentage of the gross to the victims. Not that it's the films fault in any way.

I generally agree. Dieing in freak accidents is a part of life. So many more will die in drunk driving accidents this year that they deserve no blame for, than in movie theatre shootings. I think this is a matter more of anger that there can be monsters and murderers out there who take out their own failures of a life out on others.

I would go as far to say the number of mass murder events is relatively low considering of the 300 million people in the US there's a lot of insane, sociopathic suicidal attention whores. Think about how many pedophiles there are in the US, which is just about the most sick and immoral thing you can be, even worse than a mass murderer arguably (not to mention there's plenty who double up as pedo + killing kids to wipe the evidence, making them the absolute fucking worst people on the planet) Yes, one reason why there'd be more pedos than public place mass murderers is that the former can get away with it without going to jail for life or getting the needle. But there's no shortage of suicidal people either so I'm not sure that explains it. I would seem to me like it would fit our fked up index as humans for there to be regular events of a guy with an uzi walking out into a street and unloading on a crowd after yelling say hello to my little friend, but luckily this stuff is pretty rare at least for now.

The best thing the media to prevent events like this in the future is to commit to not reporting about these stories and not show his face on TV. Just have a meeting of the networks Godfather style and make a commitment in writing that nobody will put murderers faces on TV. Of course that would require the media not being soul sucking vampires who are probably very happy this event happened. Also capital punishment should come back for cases like this. It's technically legal in COL but they've killed like one guy in 25 years so in reality, not really. IMO if a wife blows her husbands head off with a shotgun in an act of passion capital punishment is unnecessary but a mass murder is at a different level of "We need to make sure everyone who's thinking about doing this knows that they gonna die". I also recommend bringing back the electric chair just to scare the fuck out of them. If the electric chair instead of the needle scares at least one cowardly dipshit enough to prevent a mass murder it's 1000% worth it.

They should proceed with business like usual. the end.

I think things became worse for publicity when it was found the person said "I am the Joker" and that linked him to the film and that he was dressed like the Joker.

I Went out last night and people were talking about the shooting and linking the film and the shooter.
People being insensitive cracking jokes making fun of the guy saying " I am the Joker"


also the medi make the shooters infamous.

The Norway guy is so well known now.

Columbine guys are as well

You guys are reading too much into this. It's all part of their damage control plan.

You were here all night.

1. Did I imply that irrational fear is intelligent? Not sure what your counter-arguement is other than people are not behaving to your perception of how they should react, which some might define as irrational or stupid.

2. Uh, because it is dropping almost 50% while losing very few theaters. It has expanded to the outer core of what a solid art-house film can do, and it only made $4k PTA last week. There is nowhere else for it to go at this point. It is just unrealistic to think it can expand after last weekend.

Some of you are overstating the effect of the killings.

I didn't initially think the tragedy in Colorado would have such an impact on The Dark Knight Rises' box office, but it certainly appears to have had such an impact. At the same time, it is also impossible to completely disentangle the depression effect of the shooting on movie attendance, from whether we just had inflated expectations of where TDKR would land (perhaps as a result of The Avengers' opening, a very family-friendly superhero movie). I don't know too much about the ratios of midnight grosses to rest-of-opening-day grosses, but with $30 million in midnight grosses, and then "only" $77 million total for the day, seems to suggest to me that the shooting did have an impact. $47 million for Friday (without midnights), when the film made $30 million from midnights, seems like a weirdly small number. But again, I actually don't know much about this. Maybe someone else can shed some light? I'd like to know what others think.

I'll be watching closely to see how the rest of the weekend plays out. I'm very intrigued to see whether or not the shooting shapes the way box office is distributed over the weekend. Like someone mentioned prior, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people stayed home on Friday, the day of the event and news-craze and shock, but then the rest of the weekend is relatively stronger. Or maybe the opening weekend will be "depressed" and the 2nd weekend will have a strong hold. Or maybe all of this speculation on my part is meaningless, and the film just flat out didn't open stronger because it was never going to do so. (ps. I don't mean to diminish the film's opening day, which is of course still really strong, even if not perhaps meeting expectations of most)

Peace,
Mike

Everyone needs to get ready for one of the leggiest box office runs of all time. I think we are going to see a shockingly small opening, perhaps under TDK, but legs that carry film past avengers

I don't think soo ^^


This is not the 1990's anymore where a film can keep going forever or become bigger latter on.


If a lot of people skipped it opening weekend I think some of them will just wait for after theaters.

I still think it could go to 500 million.

the demand for it is still huge, and word of mouth excellent. i see a 30% drop next weekend.

Word-of-mouth for this won't be as glowing as it was for The Dark Knight. It's a far tougher film to love. It's thornier. It's slower. It's more diffuse.

The killings have become the excuse for some of you with rather unrealistic expectations.

Maybe 80m+.

You don't seem to understand the very major differences between pedophilia, psychopathy, and sociopathy, hence it is quite difficult to consider your solutions seriously. I have never seen any evidence that people capable of carrying out these sorts of acts are deterred by fear for their own lifes, since they also have suicidal tendencies. Any sort of self-preservation in indivuals without the suicidal component tends to be overwhelmed by their compulsion for malevolence.

30 million at midnights pretty much locks up 85 million opening day imo, which locks up 200m.

What do you base your belief? We have no idea. If you base it on TDK it would have done $80.5m without midnights, but that was before the explosion of midnight films. If we base it on HP8 after the explosion midnights, it would have been $68m. If the movie does better today minus midnights (I have no idea) then we have a good indication it could have done much better yesterday without the midnights than it did. It still would be not be absolute proof of anything. I have no idea and neither do you.

Could you ever so quietly shut the front door? I would prefer not read your uninformed cryptic contrarian B.S. today.

I think a significant remnant of this tragedy is that the midnight business for the upcoming Twilight will be curtailed. Yeah it's still 4 months away, but by and large the audience is young girls who will have parents that will remember what happened at a midnight screening for TDKR and not want to even remotely risk it.

30m midnights doesn't lock up 85m OD and 85m doesn't lock up $200m.

TDK's Friday minus midnights was higher than its Saturday. Let's assume TDKR opened to 85m:

Fri: 85m (55m without midnights)
Sat: 54m
Sun: 49m
---------------
WKND: $188m

Here's the thing: until yesterday evening, I didn't even believe the killings had any effect. But seriously, the hype surrounding TDKR has dropped enormously since Thursday night. No one is even talking about the movie anymore. There's suddenly no urgency to even see the movie this weekend (maybe not at all? who knows). The incident has really killed the buzz/hype we've seen seeing for a long time.

Movie talk is at all time high; driving home from boston yesterday it was honestly the oNLY subject anybody was talking about. Nobody on earth is unaware of it now.

Factor that in with good word of mouth & we should see some excellent legs. But the wind behind the sails driving the rush has totally died.

next weekend is going to be the oddest weekend.