LATE CITY
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LATE CITY
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Volume 368 Monday, July 23, 2012 Page 1 of 1

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES SETS RECORD

This is from nydailynews.com



The Dark Knight Rises” earned $160.9 million over the weekend, making it the biggest 2-D opening ever, following a mass shooting at a Colorado screening of the Batman film.

Warner Bros. said Monday that the final installment of director Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy earned $160,887,295.

The opening makes “Dark Knight Rises” the biggest 2-D opening ever ahead of its 2008 predecessor, “The Dark Knight.” It also gives the film the third-largest opening after the 3-D films “The Avengers” with $207.4 million and “Harry
Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2” with $169.2 million.

The debut puts “Dark Knight Rises” slightly below box office expectations going into the weekend, which ranged from $170 million to $200 million.

Clearly, ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ was on everyone’s minds,” said Paul Dergarabedian, an analyst for Hollywood.com who specializes in box office. “I think the American public showed they were not going to be sacred away from the movie theater by the actions of a lunatic.”

“Dark Knight Rises” earned $19.1 million alone from IMAX screenings. Tickets for 3-D and IMAX films cost a few more dollars than 2-D screenings, netting extra cash at the box office. Movies released in 3-D typically earn under half of their income in 3-D screenings, sometimes as little as a third.

Sony, Fox, Disney, Paramount, Universal and Lionsgate joined “Dark Knight Rises” distributor Warner Bros. in publicly withholding their usual revenue reports this weekend until Monday. They did so out of respect for the victims and their families after the mass shooting that left 12 dead and 58 wounded at a midnight screening of the movie in Aurora, Colorado.