Hearne: Jury Out on Post Massacre Dark Knight Ticket Sales

Tired of CNN anchors endless repetition of the claim that they want to focus on the victims not the shooter?

When it’s blatantly obvious they’ll spend the next however many weeks or months doing just the opposite? Unearthing each and every detail about the dude who knocked off a dozen moviegoers and wounded scores more in Colorado.

Thought so.

So time out. Let’s take a look at the media predicted shortfall at the box office for the latest Batman epic – The Dark Knight Rises – in the wake of Friday’s Aurora, Colorado massacre.

“I looked at the numbers for yesterday’s box office and I thought it would be $80 to $85 million for Friday,” says KCC movie guy Jack Poessiger. “And it looks like they did $75 million which is below expectations. So based on that, they’re estimating $175 million for the three day weekend. They had been looking for $180 million to $190 million. So it did have a little dip but it was not as bad as I thought it could be. It was still pretty healthy – it didn’t have a giant impact.”

One wild card:

“Part of that included a$30.6 million box office for the midnight shows,” Poessiger says. “The only movie that’s surpassed that as a midnight show was the last Harry Potter.”

Here’s the deal though…

“We won’t really know anything about how the movie did Saturday until we get those numbers. But Warner Brothers has said they don’t want to report those numbers until Monday out of respect for what happened.”

What may hang in the balance is the future of midnight movie screenings.

“Here’s why these midnight shows are so important,” Poessiger says. “Because they drive these big, opening weekend numbers and that’s really part of the marketing strategy. And you can pretty well multiply those opening numbers by three to see what the overall gross of the movie will be. I mean, it’s not 100 percent accurate, but it’s close.”

Stay tuned.