By: Russ Burlingame on July 19, 2012
With estimates coming in between $150 million and $215 million, there’s no doubt that The Dark Knight Rises will be a massive financial success. There’s even been some suggestion that it might stand a chance of breaking The Avengers‘ opening weekend box office record, set back in May.
But one of the things that helped make The Avengers such a massive smash earlier in the year was a feeling that nobody didn’t love it. Coming out of its opening weekend with a Rotten Tomatoes score of over 90% and absolutely euphoric word of mouth, Marvel’s big-budget team-up film had a ton of repeat business and drew in a lot of people who might not have checked it out, if not for all of their friends saying it was amazing.
Will The Dark Knight Rises be able to claim the same? Well, close.
The current Rotten Tomatoes score for the film is at 87%–that’s “certified fresh,” and a great number by any objective metric, but viewed through the subjective lens of a film that’s being constantly compared to The Avengers, it’s perhaps a bit less impressive. For starters, there have been a number of objectively bad reviews already, with critics calling the film “clunky” and “an ordeal to sit through.” That, combined with bad buzz from Rush Limbaugh (don’t underestimate the power the host has over his audience) have dragged the message downward a bit.
That said, the overwhelming majority of the reviews have been positive, many emphatically so. Richard Roeper said that the film “completes one of the great trilogies in movie history.”
Both films have been bolstered by brisk midnight sales and a wildly passionate fan bases who have savaged reviewers who disagree with the prevailing wisdom, to the point where The Dark Knight Rises had to have comments disabled on its Rotten Tomatoes page after abusive and threatening comments were aimed at people who didn’t enjoy the film.
