Outlook: Which Records for 'Dark Knight'?

It's finally here. Less than 24 hours until the first public screenings of The Dark Knight. Although almost every early review has been extremely positive, I wish there had been less early screenings. It's great that reviewers love the movie, but I'd skip the reassurances and go into the movie with a sense of the unknown. Maybe it will be horrible - that worry actually leads me to have an even better reaction to a great movie. On the other hand, if I know that many saw it and view it as the best movie of the year (and beyond), it takes a lot of the surprise upside out of the experience. However, let's look at the business side.

I was certainly not one of the first people in the Dark Knight record-breaking box office movement. In fact, at the beginning of the summer, I had Indiana Jones as the top grossing summer movie (it still can inch past Iron Man). I've slowly been coming around to Lee's $145 million plus opening weekend prediction. That belief hinges upon massive midnight and early morning business on opening day.

Revenge of the Sith took in $16.9 million on 2,900 theaters in midnights screenings and this was without any IMAX screens. While there are only around 160 IMAX screens (and not all will be playing the Dark Knight), the higher capacity and increased ticket prices could give The Dark Knight midnights a $2 million incremental boost. The other advantages The Dark Knight has over Revenge of the Sith are more conventional sites (for midnights and weekend) and at least an anecdotal indication that theaters are pulling out of the stops with 9, 10, 11 or more screens devoted to The Dark Knight midnights.

Update Fantasy Moguls reports, "pre-sale for its 94 IMAX locations is at $3.5M as of Wednesday." I assume not all of that is for Friday.

With ticket prices around $14 and at least 12 screens already sold out, Arclight in Los Angeles will likely pull in over $50,000 in one showtime. These back of the envelope calculations along with reports by MovieTickets and Fandango of record-breaking presales leads me to believe that The Dark Knight will come close to Sith's record midnight gross and perhaps exceed it. Let's play into the hype and say $20 million midnights and early morning showings. By the time the normal weekend business begins at around 10am or so, The Dark Knight could already be one third of the way to a one-day record (Spider-Man 3's $59.842 million). Doing an additional $40 million for the rest of the Friday seems a given. Sith had the disadvantage, at least in terms of breaking records, of opening on a Thursday.

Therefore, the midnight and one-day records look plausible. However, the weekend record will be a lot more difficult unless The Dark Knight's Friday is unbelievably high. Let's start with $60 million for Friday, including $15-20 million of midnights. With that kind of start, I would imagine a steep decline on Saturday to $40-$45 million and a drop to $32-$36 million on Sunday. That would mean $141 on the high end. Why the steep decline? I see The Dark Knight as more frontloaded, more like Star Wars or The Matrix Reloaded than Spider-Man. To have a shot at Spider-Man, I believe The Dark Knight would need an opening day of at least $65 million, which would be an astounding figure, but could still wind up short of a record breaking weekend.

I've heard that running time will be a factor going against the record weekend, but if you look at the record holders for the biggest opening weekends, you'll see that long running times seem to be the norm with record holders (with Shrek and X-Men being the sub-two hour exceptions):

The Dark Knight, 150 minutes, ? million (Lee predicts $146.4 million)

Spider-Man 3, 139 minutes, $151.1 million
Pirates of the Caribbean 2, 150 minutes, $135.6 million
Shrek the Third, 93 minutes , $121.6 million
Spider-Man, 121 minutes, $114.8 million
Pirates of the Caribbean 3, 168 minutes, $114.7 million
Revenge of the Sith, 140 minutes , $108.4 million
Shrek 2, 93 minutes, $108.0 million
X3, 104 minutes, $102.8 million
Goblet of Fire, 157 minutes, $102.3 million
Indiana Jones 4, 122 minutes, $100.1 million