While The Dark Knight Rises may make more money at the box-office than the 1989 Batman, it will sell fewer tickets than Tim Burton directed feature. According to Movies.com, with ticket prices adjusted for inflation, Rises will sell 12 million tickets less than Batman did back in the day.
Using information from Box Office Mojo, Twitter user @BrianWCollins has calculated that Rises will sell fewer tickets. The conclusion was reached by comparing the average ticket price between then and now– $3.97 in 1989 and $8.02 today.
Batman sold an estimated 62.9 million tickets when it was released, while The Dark Knight Rises has sold only 50.6 million so far. It can make up that difference as it continues to play in theaters, sure, but it can’t come close to catching up. And as Movies.com points out, that puts both of them spectacularly behind the summer’s big champion, The Avengers, which sold 76 million tickets.
I wonder how long it will take for more people to promote how many people went to see a movie vs how much a movie earned in tickets sold. It’s such an unequal method of comparison it’s not even funny.
I would love to see one major entertainment news outlet start reporting the weekly box office totals by number of butts in the seats rather than adding together $10 tickets in one area and $7 tickets in another area and thinking they’re the same.
Wouldn’t it be a more fair comparison to set “Dark Knight Rises” against “Batman Forever,” the third film in the previous series?