Thursday, July 10, 2008

'Dark Knight' Selling Out Everywhere


There's still over a week before "The Dark Knight" hits theaters.

Yet with almost all of the 1,500 midnight Thursday night showings next week sold out, theaters have been adding 3am and 6am pre-opening showtimes to meet demand.

Fandango reports that "The Dark Knight" is poised to be the year's top advance ticket-seller in wide release and is already easily outpacing "Iron Man," "Indiana Jones 4" and "Sex and the City" at the same point in those films' sales cycles.

MovieTickets.com meanwhile reports that the pre-sales for the film's tickets are already higher than such major openers as "Spider-Man 3", "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest", "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," "The Matrix Reloaded" and "Passion of the Christ".

Tracking figures posted at Hollywood Elsewhere on Tuesday showed a 31% 'first choice' rating, a figure that will only go up as next week approaches - probably hitting towards 40% on the day of release. In comparison, the 'first choice' figures on the day of release was 31% for "Iron Man", 26% for "Wall-E" and "Wanted", and 14% for "The Incredible Hulk".

"Indiana Jones" and "Iron Man" hold the biggest three-day openings of the year so far with $100.1 million and $98.6 million respectively. Despite stellar reviews and good tracking, there hangs a question mark over its ability to smash those records. Mostly this is due to the film's very dark subject matter keeping the pre-teen crowd away and the 2.5 hour runtime limiting sessions.

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