Dark Knight Ticket Sales Eight Times as Much as Spider-Man 3
WOW. Fandango is reporting that dozens of showtimes for The Dark Knight are already sold out for the midnight screenings on Thursday night/Friday morning, July 17th. That’s right, even with a full three weeks before the film hits, screenings have begun to sell out. A few theaters have begun to add 3:00am showtimes on Friday morning to help meet the consumer demand.
Update: As of June 27, “Dark Knight” has sold eight times as many tickets on MovieTickets.com as “Spider-Man 3″ at the same point in the sales cycle — 21 days from the film’s official release. “Spider-Man 3″ is the No. 10 film on MovieTickets.com’s Top-10 Performing Films of All-Time.
Sex Star Already Talking Sequel—Kinda
Now that Sex and the City has finally hit the big screenand we know who is or isn’t living happily ever afterdoes that mean we’ve seen the last of our favorite fabulous foursome?
Don’t bet on it!
“You never know,” Kristin Davis (aka Charlotte) told News at a charity screening of the movie in Los Angeles Thursday. “If Michael [Patrick King] writes something else for me, I’ll want to be a part of it.”
Not that there’s any talk of a sequel yet, said Kristin. “We ladies are always the first to hear if that’s what they’re thinking.”
That may have changed this morning. Find out why…
A box-office source says the SATC movie appears to be putting up Iron Man-strong numbers at midnight and morning screenings, and online ticket broker Fandango reports more than 1,000 sold-out shows this weekend.
Curiosity did get the best of Kristin Thursday night, when she asked the writer directly if he had another movie idea in his headbut she stopped short of asking if it was specifically for Sex and the City II.
“If I’m lucky enough, I’ll try to do another movie,” said Michael, with a beaming smile. “I’d love to do another one!”
Sex Assumptions and the City
Can men alone make a hit of The Incredible Hulk? Will women stay away? And, by the way, does a box-office expert ever get asked questions like that?
“That never comes up,” says Exhibitor Relations’ Jeff Bock.
It does, however, come up with Sex and the City.
The TV series turned movie, opening Friday, is about friends and relationships. The box-office forecast is about women and men, and who’s going to show. Or not.
Conventional wisdom, if not anecdotal evidence, says men are going to stay home, and women, like writer Sarah McLaughlin, are going to go all out.
McLaughlin, a commentator for the movie site Fandango.com, has weekend plans to meet up with 11 friends, all women, at a theater in Hollywood. (Fandango and Online are both owned by Comcast.)
“We got tickets the day they went on saleI think that was May 15, two weeks before the opening,” says McLaughlin. “We’ll have drinks beforehand, dessert after, and we’re just going to make a night of it.”
New York-based writer-editor Melissa Silverstein has already seen Sex in previews, but says she might overcome her aversion to opening-weekend crowds to check out the movie with a paying audiencean audience she expects to be largely female, for better, if not for worse.
“This is one of the overarching themes of Hollywood: Men won’t go to a ’chick flick,’ ” says Silverstein, who blogs about such themes at her site, Women & Hollywood. “It makes you less of a man if you go see one of these movies. [The perception of these movies is] they’re not as good as, they’re not as important as.”
Because Sex and the City stars Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon, four women of a certain, 40-plus age, Silverstein thinks it is a movie that’s quite important. She’s blogged that she can’t wait for opening weekend to come and go, successfully, so that the questionCan women moviegoers make a movie a hit?can be answered. Again.
“Women are not a niche,” Silverstein says. “Hollywood believes we are, but we are half the world.”
And, according to the Motion Picture Association of America statistics, they are ore than half the moviegoing audience. In 2007, 87 million women attended the movies, compared to 85 million men. The numbers suggest that women must help make lots of movies hits. Just not necessarily movies with women leads.
Last year, only two female-driven movies, Juno and Enchanted, were among the year’s Top 20 grossers.
This year, things are a bit different. The tween-skewing Hannah Montana concert movie and the adult-skewing Tina Fey comedy Baby Mama both scored weekend box office wins. 27 Dresses, starring Katherine Heigl, is one of 2008’s Top 10 hits.
Unless current champ Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull drops far more than the usual 50 percent, Sex and the City probably won’t win the weekend. But expectations, fueled by international interest, Sex-dominated magazine racks and news of sold-out screenings, are high nonetheless.
The most optimistic projections say $40 million-ish, which would position Sex to challenge the top-opening romantic-comedy of all-time, Hitch, which starred Will Smith.
The top-opening, female-led romantic comedy is Reese Witherspoon’s Sweet Home Alabama, which debuted with $35.6 million in 2002, per Box Office Mojo. And Bock, for one, thinks Sex could open in the neighborhood of the “low 30s”a gross that would still afford the $60 million movie hit status.
Or, it could open, Bock says, in the $20 million range, à la 27 Dresses. But if it falls below $20 million, look for “Sex and the Disastrous Weekend” headlines.
“This is the wild card of the summer,” Bock says. “There’s nothing that’s been like thisa two-and-half-hour, R-rated, romantic-comedy with no male leads.”
Silverstein hopes women respond to the challenge and buy tickets. And she thinks it’s a shame if men pass up the movie out of hand. But she’s not convinced Hollywood will learn a thing in any case.
Citing the lack of copycat movies generated by female-driven hits such as The First Wives Club, Something’s Gotta Give and The Devil Wears Prada, Silverstein says, “The way Hollywood perceives this [success] is, ’Oh, that’s so interesting.”
Hannah Montana Concert Movie Tickets Selling Out (I Know)
The nation’s largest online movie ticket company, Fandango, has released some stats for Disney’s theatrical concert extravaganza opening this weekend, Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour. For those who don’t know but secretly care, the movie is in 3D. What does a $15 ticket buy in 3D? Well, how about: guitar pics flying at your face, mic stands being rocked so hard the Blues Brothers would duck, the totes siked hands of huge tween audiences grabbing for you, and one twirling drum stick going “wham!” Beowulf, I want my golden duckets back.
- The concert movie currently accounts for 91% of tickets sold on Fandango
- Over 1,000 showtimes are sold out don’t cha know
- It’s already the best selling concert movie in Fandango’s history (Bono and Keith Richards, up to it?)
- Theaters are adding Thursday midnight shows and 8 a.m. screenings (we don’t need no…)
- The movie’s been a bestseller on the site since December 1st
The movie is only playing in 683 locations according to the trades, but box office is expected to be boffo-in-sequins.