By: Russ Burlingame on May 3, 2012
Well, if one guy was going to take out a whole team of superheroes, you’d have to assume it would be Batman.
Box Office Mojo, one of the Internet’s most widely-used sites for financial information pertaining to movies, is predicting that Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises will make something in the neighborhood of $500 million, stopping short of overtaking records set by The Dark Knight but out-grossing this weekend’s summer box office kickoff The Avengers by somewhere in the neighborhood of $80 million.
The site’s summer domestic box office forecast predicted that the comic book adaptations would come in at #1 and #2, while two other comic book movies (The Amazing Spider-Man and Men in Black III) would score the third- and fifth-highest takes of the summer. In between the pair, Box Office Mojo expects Disney/Pixar’s Brave to pull in $260 million and the fourth-place ranking for the season.
Back in April, movie theater industry site Fandango found that The Avengers had topped The Dark Knight Rises as the most-anticipated movie of the year among fans, but many fans argued that those results were skewed, since the study was done at the height of the hype for The Avengers, which comes out more than two months earlier than The Dark Knight Rises. With a new trailer hitting theaters at midnight (ironically WITH The Avengers) and the Bat-PR campaign about to kick into high gear, Nolan’s third outing into the Bat-verse is likely to gain momentum quickly.
One factor that may play a defining role in which movie makes more is repeat customers; while so far The Avengers has ludicrously good buzz and many fans saying they can’t wait to see it again, the widespread availability of bootleg copies on the Internet a week before the film’s release probably dampens some of that for casual moviegoers.
