The Batman Pulls In $21.6 Million Box Office In Preview Screenings

By Russ Burlingame

Ahead of the film's wide release today, Warner Bros. reported that early screenings of The Batman this week have already brought in over $20 million. That number doesn't match the haul brought in by Spider-Man: No Way Home's Thursday night screenings (that was a record-shattering $50 million), but relative to just about any other movie from the pandemic era, that's a great number, and suggests a big opening weekend for the Dark Knight. According to Exhibitor Relations, a Twitter account serving the movie theater industry, the movie has grossed $21.6 million so far. The Batman also gained nearly 1,000 new screens today, with early screenings booked at 3,300 theaters and the full roll-out hitting more than 4,200 today.

For context, $21.6 million is a bigger preview-night number than Justice League (which went on to gross $657 million) or Wonder Woman ($822 million), but not as high as The Dark Knight Rises ($1.08 billion) or Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice ($872 million), according to numbers crunched by Deadline. That report also suggested that presales for the weekend exceed $50 million for The Batman, and strong word-of-mouth accompanies a recent poll that suggests 80% of respondents feel good about going back to theaters.

Analysts are expecting The Batman to earn over $200 million globally over the weekend. A forecast of $225 million was released shortly after Warner Bros. announced they would be pulling the film from release in Russia as part of a broad movement by corporate America to penalize the country economically for invading Ukraine. Even before the Warner Bros. announcement, Russia was not part of the projection, as it was not expected to open this week. Deadline suggests the country would only have contributed about $5 million to the movie's weekend anyway, considering that their currency has taken a hit as a result of war-related sanctions from many of their trading partners.

Fans who have seen the movie thus far have loved it, and critics are smitten, too. The internet is already debating whether or not it's better than The Dark Knight, which is something that we have to argue every time a superhero movie reached 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, apparently.

Directed by Matt Reeves, The Batman sees Robert Pattinson introducing a new cinematic take on DC Comics' Dark Knight. The cast also includes Colin Farrell as The Penguin, Paul Dano as The Riddler, Zoe Kravitz as Catwoman, John Turturro as Carmine Falcone, Peter Sarsgaard as Gil Colson, Jayme Lawson as Bella Real, Barry Keoghan as Officer Stanley Merkel, and Andy Serkis as Alfred Pennyworth.

The Batman opens in theaters today.

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