MrPink93485
Member
It had the third highest opening day and weekend of all time, the second best midnights of all time (as you mentioned) and the highest 2D opening of all time. Avengers has just skewed people's perceptions.
If the Avengers had opened to $150M, people would have been ecstatic with the $175-180M weekend that most analysts are now estimating that the movie would have opened to without the Colorado shooting. However, after Avengers broke the $200M barrier, people started making crazy prediction for TDKR's opening. They had been assuming TDKR would be the biggest thing this summer, and instead of realizing that Avengers unexpected run changed things, they just upped their expectations. The exact same thing happened with the openings of Attack of the Clones and Pirates 3.
I wasn't expecting TDKR to break the OW, I had it at 190m, which I suspect would be about 10m (maybe 5m?) too much, but not too big of an overestimation. Obviously in pure gross, TDKR did fine, but the midnights which was legitimately massive represents such a large portion of the OW gross that looking at what TDKR did for the rest of the weekend, it did less than Spider-Man 3, Hunger Games, and TDK, despite the higher IMAX share. The admissions certainly was a good amount less than the former two and of course, the Avengers.
The point is, good or bad, there is usually a ton of talk about a big movie after release. For the case of TDKR, it's about two things rather than the quality of the film itself, which then turns away casual moviegoers who may now never see it.